WILMINGTON — Pink lantana and orange zinnias are still peeking through the Fifth Avenue median garden, planted between Hanover and Bladen streets in the Brooklyn Arts District. While their days are limited due to frigid temperatures, they may be uprooted sooner; the city is requiring BAD residents that started the community garden to remove all items and cease tending to the project in the public right-of-way.
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Resident Dina Greenberg first started the “eight year labor of love” in 2018, with the goal to thwart trash from being thrown into the median along Fifth Avenue. Historic homes pepper either side of the median, separating the one-way lanes. Greenberg and her husband, Bob, said it was normal to see mattresses, box springs, dressers and other items discarded and not picked up for weeks on end.
“The stuff would just sit there until Bob or I called the city,” Dina said. “There was always trash — fast food remains, bottles, cans. Plus, in the summer, the grass and weeds went crazy and there didn’t seem to be much consistency with a mowing schedule.”
Once Dina — an avid gardener for 30 years — began filling the area with plants, Bob said “the trash-dumping stopped.”
Though the Greenbergs didn’t have a permit, the city has turned a blind eye and never instructed them to stop, according to Bob. That changed mid-October when a half-dozen pink signs popped up.
“City of Wilmington maintenance crews will be clearing this area on 11/12/2025,” it indicated. “Please remove all plantings, hardscape and other items from the median and right–of-way prior to maintenance. Any items not removed by the above date will be disposed of as abandoned.”
It also referred to various code violations:
- 7-53 — giving the city manager authority to remove all unauthorized shrubs, plants and trees
- 11-45 — prohibiting people from putting benches, furniture, chairs, planters and the like in a public right-of-way
- 10-17 — preventing dumping and littering in public streets and rights-of-way
Port City Daily asked the city what prompted the move now. A spokesperson said salvaged materials within the median have created operational and safety challenges for staff’s upkeep of the median.
“The accumulation of items such as bricks, blocks, and bird baths has made it difficult and dangerous for staff to maintain the area,” spokesperson Amy Willis wrote in an email to PCD.
She added the median’s landscaping has always been “intentionally simple” — only turf and trees — in order to keep sightlines open for motorists.
“While no violations have been issued,” Willis continued, “the City’s primary goal is to restore the median to a condition that allows for safe and effective maintenance. Since the city was unable to determine ownership of some of the items there, that’s why it placed the notices asking for the items to be removed by Nov. 12.”
Valerie Fields, who moved to the area in 2020 and lives across from the median garden, said she wished they had more notice: “It’s a little harder to transplant plants near winter. So the timing could have been a little more gracious.”
When she was building her home, Fields said her lot had excess Scrub Palms and Spanish bayonets that she dug up to give to Dina for the garden. Fields’ daughter, Claire, also has frequently helped dig in the dirt there as well.
“She worked on hardscaping material, finding plants and contributed many decor items,” Fields explained. “The garden has provided opportunities for us to interact with our neighbors. It has been nice because people don’t really sit on their porches anymore, they just come and go in their cars.”
Sean Dougherty, who also lives in the neighborhood, but owns property in the countryside of Pender County, helped Dina from the start. Dougherty has a small nursery and would often provide seed or propagate plantings and rootings for the garden.
“It started out as a small vegetable garden,” he recalled, but then they added various flowers, such as rose bushes, mums, irises, purple cone flowers, and several varieties of lilies, as well as vitex to provide shade. The goal was to keep it low-maintenance.
“It wasn’t feasible to be trying to water. Everything had to be super hardy,” Dina said.
A beekeeper, Dougherty eventually began planting pollinators as well, such as indigenous wildflowers, bee balm, and milkweed — the latter of which attracts Monarch butterflies.
“It was cool to watch the Monarchs come in, lay their eggs and then hatch and just the whole process — once they were migrating up here and then back,” Dougherty said. “So it also felt educational.”
Fields said watching the garden flourish throughout the years was a joy, something passersby always found visually pleasing. It spread from the end corners at first to the middle and further into the median — “which is, I guess, how we got here today — with the city asking for its removal,” she said.
Dina would harvest cherry tomatoes, butternut squash, and zucchinis — though spinach and mesclun were most popular — to give neighbors, who would plant their own contributions or donate items in other ways.
“One of our neighbors acquired an insane amount of wood mulch for her backyard and we enlisted several people to spread the excess in the median,” Dina said.
She would go to Facebook Marketplace to scrounge up bricks and pavers to make pathways people could walk on, leading to sitting areas, such as colorful cinder blocks creating a makeshift bench or an adirondack chair. There was garden art from local artist and neighbor Arrow Ross in one area, among a hodgepodge of flowers made from scrap metal, a birdbath and a rain barrel with a sign above it instructing: “Lend a hand when you can, take all you want.”
Bob said he would often look out from his home office window and see Dina, shovel in hand, talking to people walking their dogs or expressing interest in what Dina was planting.
The garden brought her a sense of belonging, Dina explained, but also helped her acclimate to Wilmington and learn about the generations of people who lived in the Northside neighborhood before her.
“Communities are supposed to be about people,” she said. “That’s what it felt like when people just gathered out there spontaneously, admiring the flowers, just chatting about nothing in particular but enjoying being part of something, part of a neighborhood.”
Dougherty agreed, saying he never heard complaints: “If anything I heard the opposite — people complaining the city wouldn’t mow the medians so they would become overgrown.”
According to the city, it maintains a mowing schedule every two weeks.
Bob said during the Covid-19 pandemic, he noticed multiple weeks leading into a month without maintenance in areas of the median that didn’t have plants. Once the garden grew, Bob helped maintain grass-cutting and weeding on the city property as well. However, when the city did send crews by, they, too, would mind the plants and weed-eat around them so as to not disturb the vegetation.
Dina, who is on a Fulbright Scholarship abroad currently, hasn’t been stateside since the signs were posted instructing neighbors to remove the plantings and garden items. Bob has taken up the bulk of engaging with the city and said he emailed council, praising the hundreds of hours and “sweat equity” that Dina and the neighbors put into it.
“Although it’s not in season and the blooms are fading, I invite you to come over, we are so close to your new offices, and take a look,” he wrote. “Over time, the gardens are not only a source of peace and beauty, but somewhat of a neighborhood gathering place. Drivers and walkers stop to engage and admire. We get compliments almost daily.”
He added he was unsure what prompted the city to enforce the garden’s removal now, but reminded council the neighbors have all maintained it, without city resources needed. He also said the city has known about it, since they removed diseased live oaks whose stumps are still visible among the garden’s many plants.
“I recognize that there are important issues confronting the city; this is one that is unnecessary and with no expense provides a benefit to our Northside neighborhood,” Bob wrote to council.
Shortly thereafter, he said he heard from Sam Lee, landscape supervisor for the city. According to Bob, the city took issue with non-native plants and invasive species potentially being in the garden. Dina pointed to horsetail bamboo — while its root system is aggressive, she said it’s just as easy to remove.
Fields wished the city would have approached the neighbors with a compromise — perhaps suggesting what plants they’d approve of, “maybe give guidance instead of just taking it all away.”
But Bob indicated there were also concerns with overgrowth causing safety issues. During the summer, when he and Dina were away traveling, he explained the city came out and cut back the plants to a certain height.
“We have a Prius, and if you make a left turn off of Fifth Avenue to get to Brunswick from our house, it was a little hard to see oncoming traffic,” he said, “so I get it.”
More so, he suspected the city had received complaints: “I know a few new neighbors moved in who didn’t like it, but for the most part, everyone thought it looked good.”
Port City Daily asked if the city received complaints and if so how many. According to Willis, city staff has had conversations via telephone, email, and in person with area residents — “both support and oppose placing items in the median.”
Bob said he tried to compel the city and Lee by agreeing to take out the art, hardware and other items that weren’t plants, but there was no budging: “And I’m not willing to go to war with the city over this. Life’s too short.”
When asked if he or Dougherty would consider requesting a permit to continue the garden, both said no.
“It was a fun hobby,” Dougherty said, “but I have a full-time job and travel to my other home on weekends.”
Bob said other neighbors have expressed interest in pursuing it further: “And I said: ‘Go for it!’ But I know the work involved … The sad part is the literally hundreds of hours Dina put in.”
The city originally gave the neighbors until Wednesday, Nov. 12, to remove everything, but that has been extended a bit, though Bob said a hard deadline isn’t known.
Dougherty hopes the city doesn’t plant anything “generic” to replace the garden, such as azaleas or oleander. The city didn’t answer what would go there in its stead, if anything.
However, Willis said: “In response to some of the residential concerns, the city has paused removal and is currently evaluating how these areas can be maintained to a safe standard in compliance with City ordinances.”
As for Dina, she will continue gardening. It may not be in the median, but her own yard keeps her occupied.
“When you plant a bulb or a seed in the fall, and then in the springtime that little slip of green pushes through the soil, it feels like a little miracle each time,” she said.
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