Last week I worked on two posts at the same time -- one on my first garden in Brooklyn, and the second on the Rhinebeck garden. I was well into both when I realized that the two neighborhoods were almost identical in character, despite being separated by 100 miles and 75 years.
In 1943, the country was deep into the Second World War and our family on East 9th Street was no exception. I grew up on this leafy street in Brooklyn with an extended family in a big house with a front yard and a back yard, and from the beginning of the war until the end the back yards were turned into Victory Gardens. We all became gardeners.
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| WWII Victory Garden Poster |
During the war years almost all farm food production went to the armed forces, and so we started to grow our own. Children were fully mobilized for the war effort. We made rubber band balls (for what end we never knew), we made silver balls from the foil in our parents’ cigarette packages (for what use we never knew), we harvested our vegetables and pulled them in wagons to wherever we were supposed to deliver our crops. In our games we became heroes and spies, hiding in the spaces between garages, jumping off roofs to safety, decoding secrets and saving lives.
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| WWII Era Service Flag |
Every house on our block had a flag in the window with a blue star for each person in the service. We children were The Blue Star Brigade, selling 10cent War Savings Stamps door to door, pulling our wagons behind us. We were sheltered from the worst; there were no gold star families on our block. Everyone came home.
At the war’s end the front and back yards returned to their old patterns. The front yard had the expected azaleas, while the back yard was a square plot of grass bordered by neighboring garages. We had laundry lines and three plant varieties in narrow beds: a red climbing rose on a small arbor, green and white hosta – our school colors -- and the money plant, sporting silver dollar-like seed pods.
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| Lunaria, The Money Plant |
The back yards were not for sitting. If you sat outside in good weather it was on the walk running from the front steps to the sidewalk, or on the steps themselves. We played board games on the steps or ball games in the street.
Seed-starting and beginning botany occurred in school, where we set seeds in wooden cream cheese boxes discarded by the appetizing stores. In those years cream cheese was sold from the box, by the slice, and everyone started their seeds in these boxes -- a perfect size for deep, schoolroom windowsills
My inner garden life, as so much else, started with a book. At age 6 I was given Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden. I didn’t covet her garden, only her garden apron. It had four pockets – one for a ball of string, one for scissors to cut the string, one for pencil and paper to make note of what she wanted to plant, and the last for a tape measure to lay out her rows.
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| "Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden" - Published in 1924 |
My childhood copy was long gone, but I when I started this blog I tracked down an early edition. No wonder I loved it; I looked like the little girl on the cover – curly blond hair, a navy blue dress with white rickrack, a little red wheelbarrow.
The book covered every task a child would need to start a garden, ably assisted by family and neighbors. It had a strong supporting cast: a doting uncle who supplied tools, a devoted father who taught her everything, a mother who kept the household running, a mischievous boy next door, a best friend and, most significantly, an elderly woman in a wheelchair who gave Honey Bunch her late husband’s secret snapdragon seeds, which at book’s end won her First Prize in the garden show.
Many years and many gardens later, I’ve fetched up on Livingston Street in Rhinebeck, another quiet street lined with large Norway maples entering their decline.
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| Livingston Street |
After years of gardening on top of an isolated mountain on the other side of the river, I wanted to live in a house on a block with neighbors, sidewalks, and streetlights. What I didn’t see then was that without deliberate consideration I had recaptured the street of my childhood, the quiet neighborhood, the familiar faces, the sense of home.
The inescapable difference is that there are no young children on Livingston Street. On East 9th Street most households were, like mine, multi-generational. On Livingston Street there are visiting grandchildren and that’s about it. But one hopes.
I rented #71 for a few years, and when I was finally able to buy the house the garden came first. I was years behind my self-imposed schedule, and so the garden was fully conceived, planned and installed with mature plants in a single year. It would be the last in a long line of gardens I have owned, worked in, and written about.
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| Before We Started |
Next Post: The Rhinebeck Garden Begins: Nuts and Bolts.
