Greenery practically erupts from the sidewalks and stoops of Deborah Young’s corner of Bed-Stuy, particularly amid the Victorian-style homes lining Stuyvesant Avenue, where the sidewalks are lined with flowerpots and well-tended treebeds overflowing with flora.
“Bed-Stuy has always been a green community,” said Young, longtime owner of the beloved neighborhood nursery and garden center Seasons, located at 358 Stuyvesant Ave. – the go-to place for residents looking to further their green exploits and one-up their neighbors. “Always,” she added for emphasis.
But it now looks increasingly clear that the neighborhood will have to carry on its green tradition without Young’s critical hand. Young, 64, who was born in and still resides in Bed-Stuy, said the Baptist church landlord of the Seasons property has told her it intends to sell the lot, at a price beyond her reach. Young says she expects to close by year’s end.
Deborah Young converses with a customer outside Seasons.
Arun Venugopal/Gothamist
“I’ve done a lot,” Young said, reflecting on her long service in the community, which is teeming with winners of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s “Greenest Block in Brooklyn” award — especially along Stuyvesant Avenue. “I raised five boys and three husbands here.”
Officials with Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church, which Young says is not the villain in this transition, did not respond to requests for comment. But neighborhood residents said the departure of Seasons would mark another sign of change in a community affected by rising home prices and rents, gentrification, and new construction, which have sometimes left longtime residents and business owners with few options to remain.
Young said she never formally studied horticulture, but picked it up from her father, who was a rose enthusiast. Her parents arrived from North Carolina during the Great Migration, when Black southerners began relocating to the North and Midwest in great numbers, starting in the early 1900s.
“Everybody Black down there pretty much was agricultural. When my mom got here, she’s like, ‘I’m done (with agriculture),’” Young said, laughing.
Stuyvesant Avenue abounds with “Greenest Block in Brooklyn” award winners.
Arun Venugopal/Gothamist
However, under her father’s tutelage, Young planted her first seed — a morning glory — at the age of 3.
“And that plant is still growing,” she said.
Back then, Young said, Bed-Stuy had a vibrant neighborhood culture that embraced the beauty of nature, and community gardens brimming with kale, collard and turnip greens, and cabbages, even amid “all the negative press in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” mainly about crime in the neighborhood.
Tiny signs arrayed amid the neighborhood’s plantings bear verses in praise of nature.
“He who plants a tree, plants a hope,” reads one verse by the poet and abolitionist Lucy Larcom. The small placard is prominently displayed at the foot of a tree, identified as a Thornless Honey Locust. Nearby, a banner hanging from a tree proclaims that this is the “Greenest Block in Brooklyn.”
On a recent afternoon, G. Giraldo, who lives nearby, sat with Young in front of the nursery as the owner tended to her customers’ plants.
Stuyvesant Avenue abounds with “Greenest Block in Brooklyn” award winners.
Arun Venugopal/Gothamist
“It’s one thing to go to Home Depot, which is a terrible place to go,” Giraldo said. “It is a black hole of everything. Or you come to your neighbor and you buy from your neighbor.”
“I used to smoke cigarettes. I used to smoke cigarettes with you, but now I stop smoking cigarettes,” Giraldo said. “But it’s nice to sit for a while.”
Nearby, the manager of her business, Stephen Sunderland, watered peperomia plants and touch-me-nots.
“When she sits out on that street corner, it’s like the Queen of England holding court,” Sunderland said. “She knows your grandchildren. She knows you got married. She knows where you live.”
Customer Eric Smith, 70, stopped by to pick up a spider plant, which Young had freshly repotted.
Deborah Young with customer Eric Smith.
Arun Venugopal/Gothamist
“Plants keep you alive and I like to keep my plants alive,” Smith said, adding, “and I’m talking to them now, too.”
Smith, another lifelong neighborhood resident, said he hadn’t heard the news about Seasons’ ill fortunes.
“We’re gonna miss it,” Smith said.
In the back of the nursery’s greenhouse hangs a sepia-toned portrait of a young woman: Young’s mother, photographed in 1944 at age 19. The greenhouse, known as “Dottie,” was named after her.
“Her name was Dorothy,” said Young. “I thought Dorothy was too pretentious for a greenhouse name.”
Inside the greenhouse at Seasons hangs a picture of Deborah Young’s mother, Dorothy, at age 19.
Arun Venugopal/Gothamist
Young said her mother was present for the business’s opening 12 years ago, but died a year later.
Many of the neighborhood’s old-timers, Young said, have passed.
She sighed as she talked about the neighborhood’s demographic shifts, which some have likened to a “Black exodus,” as well as the cultural change that accompanied the newcomers.
“Most of them (the newcomers) are cool,” she said, then lowering her voice, added, “some of them, I call them pilgrims because they think they discovered us.”
Too few of the newer residents, she said, joined the block association, or got to know their local representatives, or neighbors – although the string of “Greenest Block in Brooklyn” designations is seen as a sign of enduring cooperation in Bed-Stuy.
“They don’t understand stoop culture,” she said. “They don’t understand block parties.”
In time, she worried that Bed-Stuy would come to resemble Manhattan, or at least her vision of it, “where you have a four-story building with five doorbells and nobody knows the people that live under them, above them, next to them.”
The scene inside Seasons, the nursery and garden shop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
Arun Venugopal/Gothamist
“That’s how it is over there,” she said. “Here, we’re nosy. We want to know who you are.”
She paused mid-thought to greet some passing neighbors, including a mother pushing a stroller. “Hey babe, how are you?”
Even as she confronts the end of her business, Young takes pains to avoid painting the property owner as the villain in her story.
She said the church had offered her first right of refusal on the property, and at a substantial discount, though still at a cost beyond her reach. And she said the landlord had been “patient” during a stretch when she fell behind on the rent.
“They hung in there with me,” she said. “They gave me this opportunity and I appreciate it.”
Young said she was now considering leaving the neighborhood altogether and moving in with one of her sons in New Jersey. She didn’t relish the idea but said her options were running out.
Manager Stephen Sunderland inside the greenhouse at Seasons.
Arun Venugopal/Gothamist
She’d been scouring available properties in the neighborhood and found the rents, in the range of $7,000 a month, to be “ridiculous.”
“I would have to sell plants and heroin,” she joked. “Maybe put a pole up and have ‘Seasons After Dark’ and put Stephen (the manager) out there in a thong and a pair of pumps.”
Her manager didn’t flinch.
“This is probably the most fun business I’ve ever worked at,” Sunderland said. “Everybody who walks out of here, walks out of here with a smile on their face.”
He said he hadn’t seriously considered life after Seasons, and said its loss would have a profound effect on the neighborhood.
“This is the village green for this area,” Sunderland said. “And when this goes, the village green will disappear.”