It was a four family house in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. At street level you can see a fenced in little garden that was totally untended.

The house on the right had a privet hedge all around the perimeter of its garden, which one day was trimmed and, as a child who had enjoyed planting the 2 cent packets of seed from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I decided I was going to root those cuttings and plant them in the untended garden.

I don't know where I learned about rooting cuttings, but I went to the hardware store, bought a galvanized tub and a box of Hyponex fertilizer. Dumped the ENTIRE contents of that fertilizer into the water filled tub, along with some cuttings and darned if they didn't survive, and eventually get planted. That's when my love of gardening was locked in. (I didn't realize that the privet hedge, which was so fragrantly abundant in Brooklyn, is considered a pest. It was probably so popular because it was a hardy survivor.)