Dan Christina manages the menagerie at Green Animals.
Julie Zack
Newport Life
The old adage “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is an unattainable dream for most people. To Dan Christina, chief horticulturist at Green Animals Topiary Garden in Portsmouth, it’s a reality.
“For a long time, I haven’t really thought of this as work,” he says. “I’m getting to create, I’m getting to cultivate a wide variety of plants and life. And that’s pretty exciting.”
Christina, a Bristol native, began his botanical journey as a child by pulling weeds in neighbors’ yards, then followed that with a degree in urban horticulture and turf management from the University of Rhode Island. He went on to serve as the assistant groundskeeper at Blithewold in Bristol for 10 years before settling in at Green Animals six years ago.
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Rhode Island Rescues
Photograph by Gavin Ashworth. All photographs courtesy of the Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, Rhode Island.
The story of the Preservation Society begins with the mission to rescue Hunter House (Fig. 1) and the question put to financier George Henry Warren Jr. after its purchase by his wife, Katherine Warren: “Well, you’ve got this house, now what are you going to do with it?”
In 1945, Newport stone carver John Howard Benson became alarmed that Hunter House a rare surviving waterfront property with deep ties to Newport’s history might be irretrievably lost. The residence was no longer needed by the Rhode Island Catholic Diocese, which had used it for a convent, and its survival was in jeopardy. So concerned was Benson that he and John Perkins Brown, whose Georgian Society also wished to save Hunter House, decided to speak with the Warrens. Benson and Brown traveled to the couple’s winter residence in New York City to warn, “the grea