6BC garden | Loisaida Nest

Last weekend we had the first sunny and warm days of spring. I visited community gardens with my friend Katy and our phone cameras. We stopped by 6BC Botanical Garden first. This garden began in 1981 and is a lovingly cared for and peaceful place. In the book Community Gardens of the East Village, gardener Cary York says, “One thing they did design wise that was so important was that someone wanted to build the raised boxes, and Diana said “Don’t do it, don’t do it. Well, if you’re going to do it, do them on a diagonal.” So suddenly, the garden had this whole diagonal thing which is so nice because it’s against the grid. Little by little people started lifting up the boxes and letting the soil be in the soil.”

photos taken with the Hipstamatic app using John S Lens and Dixie Film

Our next stop was the Sixth & B Garden. So many gardeners were out clearing the debris of winter and turning the warmed soil. I remember the group of mothers I used to hang out with when we brought our children to play in that garden. I ran into two of them that day. Even though we only socialized in the gardens, there is an intimacy to knowing someone that long and seeing their children now grown. I was interviewed by one of those children, a 20 year old named John, who I remember as a shirtless tow-headed toddler in baggy shorts, playing in the garden. He was doing a school project about community gardens. I was happy to see that the playhouse was still there.

Sixth & B Garden

the playhouse

There are many spots in New York City where you can feel transported to another place and sometimes even another time. Mostly it happens in indoor spaces. You walk into a tiny Vietnamese restaurant and all of the sudden you could be in Hanoi, eating Pho from a steaming bowl on a stainless steel counter under the florescent lights. Or you could be in an indoor market examining the baskets full of guava and fresh tamarind pods as you feel up the avocados trying to find two that are ripe enough for today’s dinner and you could easily be in Mexico City. Rarely can you be transported from an outdoor space, because New York is so very New York.

6BC Garden in all its glory

There is a community garden on East 6^th Street that does transport me – to England I go. It is what I imagine a garden would look like in someone’s big backyard. It is not manicured like a formal garden of the upper classes, but exuberant and lush. I read once that there are people in England who like to tend their gardens in the nude. I think that it is the kind of garden a naked gardener would have. A wannabee formal garden that is a tiny bit wild.

A tiny lily pond

When the gardeners took over the abandoned spaces in Loisaida and began to transform them, they salvaged the rubble. They used the brick and the broken pieces of ornate cornices carved in brownstone and limestone from the fallen buildings. The brick paths in the garden and the flowerbed edges are from pieces of fallen tenements. The buildings live on nestled in the good dirt.

a bench for contemplation

brick path

Loisaida Nest

Home in a Lower East Side Homestead

Tag Archives: 6BC garden

spring

the magical garden on east 6th street

Share this:

Share this: