95-Year-Old 'Urban Gardener' Beautifies Housing Community On St. Thomas For 20 Years

95-Year-Old ‘Urban Gardener’ Beautifies Housing Community On St. Thomas For 20 Years

CHARLOTTE AMALIE — “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,”

Certainly 95-year-old Lucinda Millin Home resident Hermon Christopher is familiar with that philosophy in life.

After all, Christopher has been applying his green thumb to an urban garden that surrounds three sides of his Virgin Islands Housing Authority community on St. Thomas for two decades.

95-Year-Old 'Urban Gardener' Beautifies Housing Community On St. Thomas For 20 Years
Hermon Christopher surveys his handiwork. (Photo by Patricia Borns, courtesy of the Virgin Islands Housing Authority)

Christopher told the St. Thomas Source that he gardens, because it gives him “something to do.”

And like-minded Lucinda Millin residents have followed him to the VIHA’s own “Green Acres,” planting tasty vegetables to eat and drink and stay healthy.

95-Year-Old 'Urban Gardener' Beautifies Housing Community On St. Thomas For 20 Years

Today, all four sides of Lucinda Millin are surrounded by a lush area of green vegetation that began 20 years ago and only gets easier on the eye every day.

A native of Tortola, Christopher grew up in a farming community, and so the cultivation of cassava, green bananas, sweet potatoes, okra, bush tea herbs and other edibles that just came naturally to him.