The Greenest Block Grows in Brooklyn
Reprinted from the New York Times, August 2022
It’s not the longest, the widest, the fanciest or the meanest. But Lincoln Place between Nostrand and New York Avenues is the greenest block in Brooklyn.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden said so. Again.
The garden will announce today that Lincoln Place is the winner of an annual contest started in the 1990s to spur urban gardening. The contest was canceled because of the pandemic in 2020, and last year, the garden ran only a competition for window-box gardeners. It brought back the block contest this year, received 100 entries from 27 neighborhoods and winnowed them to 11 finalists.
In-person visits from the judges followed. They had their criteria, which included the variety and suitability of the plants on each block, the caliber of the gardening and the level of community participation. “It can’t just be a couple of stoops,” said Adrian Benepe, the president of the garden and one of the judges.
“On each block I thought, ‘Surely this is the best block,’ until we got to Lincoln Place and — oh, my,” recalled Benepe, who took photographs along the way, including the one above.
“There are plants everywhere you look,” he said, adding that he was especially impressed by hanging baskets made from recycled materials.
The word on the block was persistence. Perri Edwards, one of the gardeners, said that she and her next-door neighbor, Althea Joseph, “got really serious” about the contest in 2017 after Joseph won third place in the window-box competition. They started an ad hoc group called Plant — Preserving Lincoln’s Abundant Natural Treasures — and won as the greenest block in the residential category in 2019.
And Edwards, who has lived on the block for 35 years, sharpened her skills by attending workshops at the garden.
“The first workshop I went to, everything I was doing for my tree was wrong,” Edwards said. “We had put a metal enclosure around the tree — cars used to hit it trying to park, but the tree outgrew that. We put in soil. That was wrong. Apparently the soil holds the moisture and rots the bottom of the tree, and that’s what makes trees fall over. And there was ivy growing up the tree. That was wrong. They said that was a ladder for rats.”
By the time the judges came around this year, Lincoln Place had a butterfly bush, elephant ears, gardenias, roses, a rose of Sharon and many other plants. “We have one that we love but it’s like a weed,” Joseph said. “Creeping Charlie. It’s beautiful. And we also have Creeping Jenny.” (Creeping Charlie is a variety of ivy, while creeping Jenny is a brightly colorful perennial.)
Edwards said climate change was one reason people on the block were willing to get involved in urban gardening. “It’s really noticeable on our block that the temperature is much cooler,” Edwards said. “People walk down our block and mention that. It’s the trees. If everybody did this, it would make a difference.”
