I never used to think of the East Coast when I thought of North American geology slowly, placidly, sinking in to the Atlantic as the entire continent moves easterly heaved up along the western edge of the Pacific Plate with our spectacular scenery, but the whole of New York was ground down between the ice sheets of successive Ice Ages leaving massive granite bedrock and ‘erratics’ along the way as they retreated north with the warming. Everywhere you go, like here in the Native Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, there is evidence of this with its thin rocky soils and rock scarred and channeled from the moving ice that once buried this place, much as it did our own Puget Sound area and points north, leaving coastal British Columbia a network of gouged out sounds and fjords, with mountains rising abruptly many thousands of feet from the sea. I wonder how the little island of my own father’s birth, a 12 mile long strip of soft sandstone, survived to today.