A walk in the woods (two blocks from Broadway)

I remember when I was a kid, seeing the road dug up outside our house in Prahran (a suburb of Melbourne Australia), and being horrified that the soil was only inches below the bitumen. I had a horror of the countryside. Now I long for the natural environment to creep into cities, and that is one of the features of Inwood, this part of Manhattan. That's New Jersey on the other side.

There may not be bark hanging in strips off tree limbs or the smell of wattle or eucalyptus smoke, but there is birdsong, a woodland smell, and a papery machine-gun rat-a-tat sound as the odd squirrel scuttles over leaf litter on the forest floor. The traffic noise of Riverside Drive is below us. For Sydneysiders who appreciate being able to walk into the bush off city streets, this is almost nostalgic.

We came across the spot where the Indian village once stood. A huge and ancient Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) once marked this place, until it died in 1938.

The plaque is nice. It tells us that legend has it that this was the spot where Manhattan was exchanged for a few trinkets. But how much more appropriate would it be in this environmental age, and to acknowledge the prior indigenous population, to replant a Tulip Tree here. I might write to the mayor.