How a Gardener at a Brooklyn Park Spends Her Sundays

A decade ago, Eve Brooks was unemployed and looking for help. A caseworker mentioned that the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation had several job training programs, including a six-month horticulture program. She immediately enrolled.

As a kid growing up in the 1960s in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Ms. Brooks said, much of her time was spent in her backyard, growing vegetables (mostly inedible) with her father. She also remembers that backyard as the site of her first battles with the city’s wild foliage.

“There was a big bush that grew out and over our chain link fence, so I came up with the bright idea to get my father’s drill and drill two holes in it,” she said. “I poured Drano in those holes and that invasive tree never came back.” (She was a teenager at the time and does not recommend that anyone do this now.)

Now she works full time for the Parks Department as the gardener at Herbert Von King Park, a storied 7.82-acre park in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Most days she can be found zipping around in a miniature truck that overflows with her “prized possessions,” as she calls them — weed whacker, leaf blower, hedge trimmer — clad in her daily uniform of ski goggles and kneepads.

“I love my job and I do it well. It can be laborious, but I don’t find it burdensome,” said Ms. Brooks, who, at 64, said she has no plans to retire anytime soon. “Each day I get here I want to be a benefit to somebody, to make somebody happy.”

Ms. Brooks lives with her 32-year-old daughter in a two-bedroom apartment in Starrett City, an affordable housing complex in Brooklyn that overlooks Jamaica Bay.