A Rare Lush Landscape in the Bronx Is Also a Place to Belong
August 29, 2008 | New York Times
By TINA KELLEY
Along the entry path to the Tremont Community Garden, there are seven unmatched tables, each with four chairs tipped toward them to keep rain from collecting on the seats. On many summer evenings half the tables are full — of gardeners and nongardeners and the children of both — as the people who live in the neighboring Bronx apartments use the place as a communal living room. Its 17,500 square feet are alive with four o’clocks, magenta blooms you cannot quite set your watch by. Two cabbage white butterflies twiddle above the cucumbers, and a goldfinch perches near a hollyhock.
But it is also bustling with a particular kind of people — self-proclaimed “diggers” who first learned their skills in the Carolinas or Virginia or Georgia. They plant okra and collard greens, but they are open to the yams and callaloo favored by fellow gardeners with Latino and Jamaican roots.
“If I couldn’t come here, it would be rough,” said Elizabeth Butler, 77, the garden’s president, who arrives each morning about 6:30 to feed the alley cats and remove the garbage bags hung around the fence to prevent litter. “I’d be a mess, a disaster. I can’t stay in the house.”
