NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Phil Macaluso, a gardener, bikes to work at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden four days a week from his home about a five-minute ride away. The garden is closed, but the trees and everything else in Brooklyn are still growing, even if other aspects of the city’s life have come to a standstill.

The garden’s 52 acres of cherry blossoms, azaleas, crabapple trees and daffodils are reaching their peak beauty now, and though there are few around to witness it, the two dozen gardeners still work to keep the plants flourishing, the pests and weeds at bay, the lawn mowed.

“It’s a garden, you know? It’s not a natural forest,” said Macaluso, 52. “So without people working it, it just kind of goes back to its natural state. We can’t keep it up to the horticultural level that Brooklyn deserves without going in and working.”

Gardeners like Macaluso and his colleagues at botanical gardens around the city have been deemed essential workers, a designation they agree with. The maintenance required to keep gardens of this size operating and beautiful is endless, with one season’s tasks ongoing even as preparation for a new season begins.

“People who visit botanical gardens, this is like a museum of plants,” said Colin Kirk, a gardener at the Queens Botanical Garden. “They’re different than people who visit parks. They’re really interested in gardening.”

Kirk bikes to work, too, from his apartment in Jackson Heights. For days after the pandemic hit, he always carried around a note from the garden’s executive director declaring him an essential worker, just in case someone in authority stopped him.

He can’t afford to miss any time in the garden — in a prepandemic world, Kirk and three other full-time gardeners had 20-plus volunteers and several seasonal interns to help tend the garden’s 39 acres. Now it’s just the four.

“There’s a million things to do,” Kirk said.

At the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, there are 15 gardeners each day tending to the garden’s 250 acres — there are 54 total, working on staggered shifts throughout the week.

Many of the city’s botanical gardens are having to make do with limited staffs, with some gardens laying off or furloughing workers. Some gardeners have taken pay cuts and are working shorter hours.

“My fear is what the future will look like, when it boils down to it,” said Lenny Paul, a foreman at the Brooklyn garden and president of the local union chapter of District Council 37 that represents botanical garden workers in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. “I mean, are we going to have more pay reductions? Are members going to be laid off? We don’t know.”

Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden on Staten Island has put some staff on partial furloughs to make up for lost revenue but has decided to keep its grounds open. “We continue to do everything we can to maintain consistency and stability for our staff as well as a safe and healthy facility for all of our visitors,” a representative for Snug Harbor said in a statement.

Deanna Curtis, a senior curator and landscape project manager at the New York Botanical Garden, said the mood in the gardens is different without visitors. “When I’m on site now, with even the reduced horticulture staff, if you’re out and about doing something on the grounds, it can be a long time before you even see anyone,” she said. “It just has this eerie quality.”

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has found some ways to spread the blossoms outside its gates, horticulture director Ronnit Bendavid-Val said. Staff cut dozens of daffodil bunches Tuesday and brought the bouquets to medical professionals at a nearby hospital; another 800 pansies went to Green-Wood Cemetery.

But still, Bendavid-Val added, “It does feel like a loss. This incredible explosion of gorgeous blooms right now, and it’s like, where’s the people? People should be seeing it and loving it and appreciating it.”

Two employees in Brooklyn usually tend to the indoor pavilions and greenhouses each day, with another three working outside. Macaluso, a general grounds crew gardener who first came to the garden as an intern more than a decade ago, spends most of his time taking care of the grass.

“You love the peace and quiet,” Macaluso said. “We get to go and enjoy the garden with nobody else there. In my particular case, I operate a lot of machinery cutting the lawn and doing things, so I don’t have to keep my head on a swivel to watch the little kids running around.”

Although there is a tranquility to wandering alone through dozens of tree-lined acres in full bloom, the gardeners said they miss the regulars — the neighbors who come routinely with their cameras and their questions about how to do this or that.

“I chose to work in a public garden,” Macaluso said. “I didn’t want to go work on a private estate or do landscaping or brownstone terraces and things like that because I think myself and a lot of the gardeners in public gardening see it as a public service.

“You want those gates to be open so people can come in,” he added. “It’s a little bit sad that you can’t share it with everybody.”

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