Connie, age 59, changed careers late in life, leaving her field of journalism for the greener pastures of the city parks.

I've always had good gardens. In fact, I still have a rather great garden in San Francisco, behind the Victoria House. People come to take pictures of it, and paint it.

And I had a nice little garden in Washington D.C., but I wanted to stop being a putterer. I wanted to be someone who knew why things failed, and why things succeeded.

I was a journalist, and I took four months off, and apprenticed myself to a garden designer I really love. I worked with him as a sidekick, mainly doing weeding and doing containers in the houses of the rich, and then I went back to work as a journalist.

Then my husband got a job in New York, and we moved here. I got a job that I didn't like, and I was walking around where we were living then, and I went by a little park named St. Catherine's. And I could see somebody spent maybe $100,000 remodelling it, maybe $40,000 on trees, and no one was watering it, and everything was dying.

So I began volunteering there. I quit the job I didn't like, I went to school at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden at night, and I was hired by a Parks guy who saw me volunteering and said, “You're the only person besides me who knows how much water things really need.” That was five years ago.

Sometimes the public can be careless. Kids running, jump over a fence, stomp on something, and I come by two days later to find it squashed in the middle. And people putting their dogs over the fences, off the leash, and the dog will take a dump. I think anyone can imagine how distressing it is (and this is all gardeners in New York City share this), when you're planting something, and you're working what you think is a little lump of soil, and it's not a little lump of soil... and you think, “Goddamit!”

There's gotta be some kind of balance reached between, “Oh, the joy of my glorious hunting dog off the leash!” and the plants.