'Bertha Foster Garden'

Dave Hauck's garden plot at the West Springfield Street garden in Boston's South End neighborhood. JOHN NORDELL / STAFF

My Boston is a 10 ft. by 14 ft. piece of brown earth on West Springfield Street in Boston's historic South End.

Beneath the roar of sirens heading for the Boston Medical Center and the screams of children defying gravity on the Hurley School jungle gym, it's where I grow lettuce, rhubarb, brussel sprouts, and 11 types of tomatoes. It's where I mingle with one of the most diverse populations in the city. It's where I find a brief respite from the intensity of urban living.

Not that I want to find respite, really. City living suits me fine, and there's no better place to do it than the South End.

Within eight blocks of my brownstone, lurking amid the neat rows of brick bowfronts that make up the largest Victorian brick rowhouse district in the United States, I have had: the most succulent steak tartare (at The Butcher Shop on Tremont Street); the most decadent chocolate souflé (up the street at Icarus); and hot dogs and baked beans (at Code Ten on Washington Street) that would make the vendors at Fenway Park blush.

But it's at the West Springfield Street Garden that I feel most at home. The garden should be called the "Bertha Foster Garden," for the woman who resurrected the 1/4-acre clearing from the rubble of decaying buildings some 30 years ago. Mrs. Foster, who was picking cotton in the South when she was my age, helped carve out 25 plots where rich and poor, black and white, young and old, mingle during the warm days of summer.

My vegetables have an inferiority complex next to hers. Her peas are taller. Her peppers are sweeter. Her tomatoes are redder. She's out there just about every day from April to October, weeding, pruning, watering - coaxing her plants from the ground. It's a joy to watch.

Boston wouldn't be the same to me without my plot. Now if I could just get my soil as black as Bertha's.

— by Dave Hauck

'Bertha Foster' garden - Dave Hauck	Chat up someone, anyone - Jim Bencivenga	Beantown music scene - J. Johnson
What's foreign found local - Susan Leach	How to walk in Boston - Judy Lowe	Just take a walk - Greg Lamb
Delegates unite - walk! - Greg Palmer	Where to go for some seafood - Daigo Fujiwara	Seek out a quiet moment - Tom Regan
'To think that I saw it on Newbury St.!' - Christina McCarroll	Some antiquarian bookstores of Boston - Tom Toth