This website documents the history, plants, and events of Betty’s Community Garden at Hull St. in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, as a community archive. The garden was incorporated as Hull Street Community Garden in 1997 and renamed in 2023 in honor of Florence “Betty” Simon (1941–2021), one of its co-founders and the longtime president of this neighborhood sanctuary.
We celebrate and remember Betty and the many “Bettys” who have been the true heroes of our communities. We all came from somewhere and made a new home in Brooklyn. We do our best to carry forward what they began by caring for the trees and shrubs they planted, and for the flowers, fruits, and vegetables that make our lives healthier and happier. Many of these trees will outlive us by decades, or even centuries!
This website project was made possible with the support of the Hunter College Faculty Community Engagement Seed Grant. I’d like to thank Megan Demerkis for her tireless support and encouragement (and visiting our garden!). My sincere gratitude goes to my garden elders and fellow gardeners and my student-teachers at Hunter who helped to make it come alive: Sarah Bryant, Juan Huapaya, and Angela Simon (Betty’s daughter and a garden member) for sharing your precious stories; Sfera Louis for contributing two original oil paintings filled with love and respect; Luke Popadics for creating the intricate interactive map; Starrie St. Edwards, our tree doctor, for researching and writing care instructions for our fruit trees; Marie Gloria Sibomana for creating a visual history chart for our garden; Junaid Arif (DP), Luke (2nd Cam), Theo Beck (boom operator), Sfera (best boy and best set design woman) for recording oral histories; Sfera, Marie, Lauren Belliard, Pamela Nell, and Naho Hirohata for facilitating dialogues with the elders (also Pamela for interpreting for Juan); Christian Avila, Gabriel for the oral history venue setup help; Chelsea Fowler and Isaac Sante for helping with the page design, element linking, etc, and Ava Novak and Marie for helping with installing the metal tags with QR codes on our trees and shrubs. I also like to thank Melissa from TheMisfitCrafterShop for working with me to design those tree and shrub tags! Thank you, all! I hope future generations of the stewards of Betty’s garden will find this site useful and keep updating it for their future generations 🙂
Reiko Tahara, Oct, 2026
