Christy, age 36, has discovered that being a New York City Parks Department gardener has given her a way to connect with people, even though they drive her crazy.

“I only started gardening five years ago, just after I moved here. I’d done a little gardening as a hobby, but only super part time. I had an apartment in Greenpoint with this dust bowl in the backyard that hadn’t been touched in years and I was going through a difficult time in my life because my mother was dying of cancer. So I started gardening and I found that it was the only thing that shut my brain off; I could block everything out and it was really addictive.

“When I began fixing up the back yard, all of a sudden I started getting to know the man who lived downstairs, a recluse, Robert, who has since passed on. Robert never spoke to anybody, but when I started working in the back yard he would come out and blab.

"There was an Iranian family next door, and this crazy Iranian grandmother lived in the backyard: she slept on a mattress back there. She didn’t know any English at all, but she would lean over the fence and kind of grunt at different plants and I would dig them up and give them to her and she would give me some from her garden ... we were trading and not even speaking to each other.

“Then I moved to downtown Manhattan and I didn’t have my little garden patch anymore. So I started looking for parks where I might be able do something, and I volunteered at City Hall Park. I worked there for two summers with the gardener there, Rich, who is my mentor. I would walk around the park with him and I’d ask, ‘What’s this? What’s that?’ And I would take notes on everything. I bought some books and I started learning all the different varieties and how to best grow them and it just kept going from there.

“All this time I was working as a bartender, and then the bar closed. I was fortunate enough to have a little bit of a windfall come my way and I did an internship with the New York Botanical Garden, which paid nothing. I mean, it paid $10 an hour, but certainly not enough to live on.

"I left the Botanical Garden and I was doing rooftop gardening for rich people – and that was terrible. It was all grunt work and no design. Then I was offered a part-time job with the Parks Department, so I quit the landscaping job and worked downtown at a little park right at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, called the Living Memorial Grove. There’s five trees planted there that were rescued from the rubble of the World Trade Center.

"I worked at Washington Square Park last summer for about three months, but I quit because it was horrible. In every way. I mean, human beings crap in the flower beds and there’s all that garbage and fighting with the homeless people who pitch tents all over and people smoking crack. And NYU kids just completely disrespectful, walking through the park with bags of food and throwing their napkins and cans and straws everywhere and I just wanted to kill everybody in that park. So I quit before I did.

"I was just hired full time this year at Stuyvesant Park. I’m a very pessimistic person, but I know what I’m doing makes me and other people happy. Even if people don’t appreciate it, I know that it does something for them; it’s at least cleaning the air that they breathe. I used to work in sales and then I worked in advertising, and it all left me cold. It was just using my talent to sell crap. Everything catered to wealth, but working at a park is for everybody. That’s why I hated rooftop stuff, because some of the gardens that I did were really beautiful, but they were for one person or a family that was only out there for a half an hour to have drinks. They didn’t even care about what they had. In a park, it doesn’t matter if you're homeless or the mayor, it’s all here and it’s accessible to everybody.