A small garden in New York -- meet Harri Ramlakhan
Great profile of a fascinating person at the
New York Times:
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Bug-Me-Not to bypass registration if needed)
The Greenest Thumb
It is late April, and the days are slow for Harri Ramlakhan. He rises early, around 5 or 6 in the morning, and starts to pace around the living room of the apartment in Stapleton, Staten Island, where he lives with one of his five sons. For most of the day, Mr. Ramlakhan wears sweat pants and rubber sandals. Sometimes he wanders into the kitchen to chomp on handfuls of dried chilies and fenugreek seeds.
In the afternoon, maybe earlier if the sun is shining especially bright, he ducks out into the front yard to check on his plants. There, in rows of white plastic pots, are small green buds of vegetables in every variety: hot peppers, long beans, string beans, two kinds of squash.
If, as its practitioners are fond of claiming, gardening is the slowest-moving fine art, Mr. Ramlakhan is its Jackson Pollock, grumbly and cocksure, producing brilliant work while alienating many of those who could appreciate it. At age 68, he is perhaps New York’s most talented urban gardener, consistently dominating annual city-sponsored competitions in categories like longest squash and best-tasting tomato.
He joined his first community garden in New York four years ago and quickly developed a reputation as something of a gruff and self-aggrandizing character, the kind of gardener who is liable to chase you out of his plot with a machete if he sees you nosing around.
Mr. Ramlakhan dismisses much of this talk as merely the signs of jealousy.
He has bounced from garden to garden in recent years — he lasted two seasons at his first garden, in Far Rockaway not far from Kennedy Airport, and he spent last year at a small plot in a garden on Lakeview Boulevard in South Jamaica, Queens. But during these slow days of April, as he awaits word from the city’s community garden officials on his request to plant in a larger space than he had last year, he is a gardener without a home.
A bit more:
On a September afternoon three years ago, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Harvest Fair, an urban homage to the county fair held at the end of every summer, was in full swing. It was Mr. Ramlakhan’s first year with a plot in a Green Thumb garden, and he brought so much produce that one of his sons had to give him a ride. By the end of the day, he had amassed 12 first-prize ribbons, and in doing so, he established his reputation within New York’s close-knit world of community gardening.
“There’s something sort of mystical about him,” says Cara Monaco, the outreach coordinator for Green Thumb. “It’s like he’s a vegetable guru.”
The following year, 2005, Mr. Ramlakhan had nine first-place winners. Last year, he entered six vegetables in the contest and took home six first prizes: longest squash, longest bean, largest okra, largest eggplant, heaviest tomato and best-tasting tomato.
Looks to be quite the character:
It's a three page story worth reading for a fascinating character study.
Posted by DaveH at June 25, 2007 8:48 PM