The Flower District.

It’s a jungle out there.

Plants aren’t exactly clickbait. But stay with me. For me, this is a different kind of street photography.

Every spring, the gardening trades and the city’s civilians funnel into a few battered blocks of Manhattan to get their green fix. Packaged, priced, and palletized, the Flower District becomes a rare site of IRL eco-socialization: strangers brushing past one another with flats of seedlings, dirt under their nails, hope in plastic pots.

The photographs are a meditation on the urban garden’s leftovers—the cracked pots, snapped branches, stray soil—and what the retail plant trade quietly demands: a kind of soft deforestation, scaled for city life.

I stalk these streets with deliberate restraint, fully aware this will never reward me with the illusion of being “in nature.” Anyone who lives far from it knows this limitation well. Still, I’ll take what I can get.

In the city, gardening is often reduced to a windowsill ritual. I’m lucky—I have a sunny ledge. Many don’t. The entire trade depends on this gap between our need for nature and our lack of access to it. That need gets expressed in the smallest of gestures: the purchase of a single leafy green.

For a moment, the district wraps you in dirt’s best effort. Somehow, even on a busted strip of Manhattan, it’s possible to feel awash in oxytocin. Strip that away and what remains is just the district itself—these few bedraggled streets where you can already feel developers circling. Gentrification hums in the background.

And yet.

Even here, in the concrete jungle, the Flower District still radiates something gritty, abundant, and joyful.