Christopher’s Secret Garden
A gate creaks open. Inside are little stone pathways and a small stone bench. The bench stands surrounded by layers of espalier apples, boxwoods, an apricot tree, flower bushes, and vegetable plants. The garden is located on an empty townhome-sized lot, hiding in the most obvious of places, but never noticed. On Degraw Street, between Court and Clinton, lies a lovely English garden that hardly anyone knows about.
This Degraw Street garden was owned by a British gentleman named Christopher Adlington. Christopher and his partner, Nat LaMar, lived in Cobble Hill in a rowhouse, just around the block.
Christopher, often described as the classic proper English gentleman, first traveled to New York on a summer internship as an accountant but never left. For decades, he cultivated his garden, rarely ever letting anyone inside. However, he would often have conversations with people passing by while pruning hedges. One Cobble Hill dweller, Rick Anderson, remembered how skilled Christopher was at his craft, "He was just a master,” he reportedly said, “This is an absolutely unique and unusual garden.”
Neighbors and people in the community drawn to the garden’s never-ending beauty, began affectionately calling it “Christopher’s Garden.” There was something enchanting that captivated locals and neighbors who walked by. On the Cobble Hill-oriented blog, Pardon Me For Asking, a local neighbor named Teri was quoted as saying that Christopher “created a magical oasis and shared so much beauty with the neighborhood.” With his son, Teri said he “would always pass Christopher’s ‘Secret Garden’ and sing ‘The House at Pooh Corner’ by Loggins and Messina. It really was a sweet spot of magic for all of us.” The garden is a magical haven in Brooklyn, and its value to the community is indescribable.
In June, 2015, a bouquet of cut flowers was seen mounted to the fence of the garden, and the community feared the worst. Christopher had passed on. On Pardon Me For Asking, people shared their tenderness for the man who had passed. A user named Katia posted an entry honoring Christopher and captured several people’s thoughts and sentiments. Katia quoted local Lela Nargi as saying, “We shared snippets of our life with Christopher through this fence on still Sunday mornings, and accepted ripe figs from his tree, and wondered to ourselves if we would ever be lucky enough to be invited into the inner sanctum, like no one else, ever, as far as we could tell. Now it is our abiding sadness to bid Christopher farewell. The grace and the poise and the beauty of the block go with him, try as we might to hold on to the vision of loveliness he created here.”
Through anonymous comments, blog posts, news articles, and more, it was clear that the community was grieving not only Christopher’s death, but the imminent death of the garden. People desperately hoped it wouldn’t be taken over by real estate developers, and the garden covered with asphalt. A neighbor expressed one final wish at the end of a blog post, “Wouldn’t it be lovely for us to join together to purchase the garden and to open it to the community as a way of honoring his memory? It is probably a fantasy, but yet…” The entire community hoped that something more would become of the garden. Not many could sacrifice time, money, and effort to keep it alive.
Six years later, what has become of Christopher’s Garden?
Julia Lichtblau lived next door to Christopher’s Garden for years in a gothic-style converted church. After Christopher died, his partner Nat LaMar decided to leave the property to the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust in his will. Julia, like everyone, didn’t want the garden to be bulldozed. Still, the garden is large and demanding: “I didn’t want it to become my life. For one person to do it and keep it so immaculately, it would be a giant job,” Julia remembered thinking. A solution was needed to keep the garden going for the long-term.
Julia reached out to neighbors and friends. Eventually a small, dedicated group of Brooklynites gathered every week to clean up the garden. Over time, a community of gardeners formed, having bonded over the planting of bulbs or laying down stones. One night, on the solstice, after the first snow, one of the regulars of the garden, Matt, suggested that the group carol. So the whole group got a fire pit, and gathered around the warm hearth. Drinking mulled wine and singing, Julia remembered, “We were all caroling in the snow in the garden. And there were a lot of people. And that was pretty special. It was almost primitive. The fire, the snow, the singing.”
In previous times, almost no one passed the gate into the Secret Garden. Julia has changed this culture and made the garden into a place of inclusivity. She described how people who knew Christopher and the garden are shocked when they step inside. Julia mentioned one moment in particular when she invited a 90-year-old man into the garden. He said, “I can’t believe it, I’ve lived here for fifty years, and I’ve never been inside. This is a miracle.”
The public garden is not only impacting the new generation, but the old as well. Julia noticed a pattern, where people tentatively stand at the gate, just thinking, “Can I really come in?”
Although Christopher is gone, his memory is not. While planting, deciding where to place mesh, or trimming leaves, “We think about him, evoke him, a lot,” said Julia. The idea of the proper English gentlemen with the perfect English garden is still a uniting force. Julia recounted how she went to buy rhododendron bushes, and a woman who lives on Degraw Street looked at them and said, “Christopher would’ve really liked these bushes.”
By late-winter 2020, a steady group of people tended to the garden, but more hands were still needed. Julia sent emails, posted signs, and reached out for more help. The group was called the “Friends of the Secret Garden,” and the idea was that the community would become a sustainable way for the garden to continue.
Then, the city shut down. During the pandemic, the garden has become a sanctuary for a range of desperate parents, to displaced nature lovers, and everyone in between. Now called “The Secret Garden,” everyone is welcome to care for the plants. Julia remarked how people are always so surprised when they are invited inside.“They’re being invited into the wardrobe in Narnia,” Julia said.
For children, it is a way to be outside and play with their hands. For kids growing up in a city with so little green land, and being confined in an apartment, it is a way to connect to the Earth and nature. Even some extremely young children come to visit the garden, play with tools and learn about gardening. The pandemic caused many people to be hit with the gardening-bug. Being stuck inside all day, in a small city apartment, so far away from wildlife, people realize the value of nature. It fosters a sense of community, especially for those with green thumbs. Julia brought up how the garden is so special because there’s an atmosphere where “You have that craving to grow stuff…There’s this kind of gravitation of people like that.”
One woman in particular began to visit the garden. With natural beauty and a pregnant belly, she passionately immersed herself in the work, finding satisfaction in the nitty-gritty dirty work of gardening. Julia worked in the garden with this young thirty-something year-old woman. Julia was struck by a feeling of community that bridged the generation gap between her and the woman. “It was that feeling of communion, between cross-generations… There was just a feeling. She was much younger than me. And there was just something so, I don’t know, beautiful to see somebody, to see her, just up to her wrists in dirt,” Julia laughed.
While this garden does boast a community of inclusivity, how many people really are included? New York City is a melting pot with people from all over the world, with different ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds. Throughout the recent years, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, as well as the surrounding areas, have gradually gotten less diverse and have been majorly affected by gentrification. As townhouse prices soared to millions of dollars, and mom-and-pop storefronts were bought out by chain stores, the wealth in the neighborhood has only risen.
Julia noticed how there used to be “much more income diversity, and there was more ethnic diversity.” She wanted to find a way to bring diversity to the garden, and expand the community it serves, she said, “It makes me a little sad because I have friends from a lot of different backgrounds but many of them don’t live in this neighborhood. And it’s very hard to find a way to bring in diversity. So that’s my, I’ll say that’s my biggest regret. It’s not happening organically, and I don't think it’s going to happen organically.”
Although the garden is seen as a success, it is not a complete success in the eyes of Julia yet. One way to get it closer to being one is to spread more knowledge about its existence, private emails and posters can only go so far. One of the younger gardeners started an Instagram account to try and raise awareness about the garden.
Though it wasn’t easy, the wishes of the Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens community came true: the garden survived. Not only is the garden thriving, but it helped its gardeners hold out through the pandemic. Fellow gardener Ena K. commented, “Mr. Adlington has gone on, but the legacy he left behind will live on in the hearts and minds of the community so inspired by his horticultural pursuits. Rest in peace.”