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The Greenest of the Green: A Report From the 13th Annual Greenest Block in Brooklyn Contest
By Constance Casey
Despite the soul-melting heat of last summer, I look back with great pleasure on trudging around Brooklyn with my clipboard as one of four judges of the Greenest Block in Brooklyn competition. In 2006, 250 blocks entered the competition. It was our task to scrutinize the six blocks that made it to the semifinals. Last year we ranked them based on the following criteria: the variety and suitability of the plants on display; horticultural practices; soil condition and use of mulch; maintenance; color and total visual effect; and citizen participation.
2006 First Place: Residential
East 25th between Clarendon Street and Avenue D
This is no contest for casual, sometime gardeners: It takes a village—or at least a block—and lots of planning, perseverance, and cooperation to turn the harsh city landscape into a verdant refuge for plant life. Brooklyn is a crowded place, with precious little green space. Most of the blocks in the contest's residential category have attached or semidetached houses with front yards the size of a Ping-Pong table.
Enterprising urban gardeners make up for the lack of acreage with window boxes and cleverly composed containers. They also endeavor to plant in the single hardest spot to garden outside the Sahara Desert—the gloomily but aptly named "tree pits," which house New York's street trees. Tree pits are exposed to just about every destructive force city life has to offer: drought, dog pee, litter, broken glass, cigarette butts, car exhaust, baking heat from the street and sidewalk, wayward delivery trucks, and drivers who are really bad at parallel parking.
Gardeners on crowded Brooklyn blocks face logistical problems suburban gardeners don't have—like getting their hands on large amounts of soil-improving mulch. On blocks where gardening is a devoted pursuit, one of the residents with a car usually drives a few times each growing season to Green-Wood Cemetery, where free mulch and wood chips are given out. One judge had even observed Brooklyn gardeners using shopping carts to collect Green-Wood's mulch. When Brooklyn Botanic Garden has its compost giveaway, gardeners can be seen lugging garbage bags full of the stuff onto the bus. Getting plants home from the nursery or the greenmarket is also a hassle for the urban gardener. Some blocks go in together on renting a van to transport plants they've bought in bulk.
When you make something beautiful and then display it on the street, you run the risk of encountering, shall we say, "human problems," but Brooklynites face these matters with signature sangfroid. The night before our judging visit, someone stole a number of planted containers from one contestant block. The next day, one of the block's gardeners stepped out of her house as she saw us approach. When a neighbor mentioned the theft, she dismissed it with a smile: "Let's just say we have obstacles," she said. "We face them and we move on."
Second Place: Residential (tie)
Fuller Place between Prospect Aveneue and 16th Street
The winner of the 2006 competition was East 25th Street between Avenue D and Clarendon Street in Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood. The gardeners of East 25th Street are not easily discouraged. The block won a special commendation in 1999 for "Most Improved Entry," and things have only kept improving. The block tied for third place in 2002, took third again in 2003, and won the contest in 2004.
We knew we were in for something great in 2006 when our first sight as we stepped out of the van was a young tree, freshly watered and mulched. A continuing theme ran from yard to yard: Each house echoed its companions with lively black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia fulgida), a hardy native perennial. The container plantings showed similarly effective repetition with lime-green or variegated tropical cannas. One container glowed with tall, silky green canna leaves surrounded by low orange and pink Callibrachoa (which look like miniature petunias) and trailing wine-red coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides).
As well as creating a pleasing rhythm, the repeated plants showed that the gardeners on the block had been sharing. Some neighbor had divided those black-eyed Susans; someone knew to dig up and store the tubers of the tender cannas until they could be replanted in spring. I was impressed to see a tree peony in one East 25th Street yard, as this plant demands ambition and patience. In Chinese folklore, an empress once commanded all of the flowers in the kingdom to bloom simultaneously. The tree peony alone resisted and thus became a symbol of stubbornness.
Second Place: Residential (tie)
Fulton Street between Carlton and Cumberland
The East 25th Street block's plants were blooming (or leafing out) readily, as each had been planted in an appropriate place. In the partial shade of a front porch, a container combination of caladiums, asparagus fern (Asparagus densiflorus), and coleus demonstrated that you don't have to have sun or use flowers to create a showy display.
All of the blocks in the 2006 competition showed devotion, care, and pride. It was an honor for me to be in a position to view and appreciate the hard work of so many home gardeners. It takes a little ingenuity, lots of watering, and unremitting dedication to take an ordinary Brooklyn block and make it one of the greenest.