SKYSCRAPER GARDEN

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 121, 24 May 1941, Page 2 (Supplement)

SKYSCRAPER GARDEN

THE world's most unusual gardener is Aart Marius van den Hoak, who grows three acres of some of New York's finest flowers, shrubs and trees on rooftops •which are seven to seventy storeys above Fifth Avenue. Van den Hoak is in charge of all natural beauty for Manhattan's Rockefeller Centre. During the season he can step into a Radio City elevator, get off at the eleventh floor, walk out on a rooftop and pick a juicy red apple off his Baldwin tree. One summer he played host at his eleventh-floor vegetable garden to a girl scout troop. The girls picked his corn, built a fire and held a camping-out corn roast. One of New York's most congested business areas was just several hundred feet below. Van den Hoak learned horticulture in his native Holland, and went to the United States several years ago. In 1933 he was engaged as gardener at Rockefeller Centre. The first step for a skyscraper garden, he says, is a series of agricultural.pipes laid on

trie concrete roof. On top of that, four inches of coarse cinders, then four inches of crushed stones and pebbles. The top layer—about 16 the finest topsoil. Van den Hoak uses almost every variety of tree and flower. Some of his trees are 30 feet high. Special equipment hauled them up the sides of the buildings. Wheelbarrows piled with dirt, manure and plants are often trundled through the marble-lined halls to the roof elevators—after hours, of course. Besides transportation Van den Hoak has two more problems which few other gardeners have—high winds and soot. Tall walls help cut off the wind. Every night highpressure hoses wash off the street dirt that accumulates on petals and leaves. In Van den Hoak's rooftop vegetable garden is Manhattan's' only scarecrow, and a beehive, which now houses about 40,000 honey makers. At first he was a little worried about his bees. When they could not get enough honey at home they would scoot up to Central Park. But now his skyscraper gardens are big enough to keep than busy 24 hours a day.