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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Julie Zack
Newport Life magazine
Being a kid during a Newport summer can be an idyllic experience, riding bikes through narrow streets or heading downtown to jump off a pier. That’s how Allyson McCalla remembers spending her afternoons growing up in Newport.
“My brother, my sisters, and my friends and I would ride all throughout the Newport streets. We knew Newport like the back of our hands,” McCalla recalls. Riding a bike opened up the city to her, especially as summer crowds made other modes of transportation less efficient.
While biking was a crucial method of exploration in her adolescence, McCalla didn’t continue biking into adulthood. “I was not an adult bicycler at all,” she says. It wasn’t until she became involved with the nonprofit bicycle advocacy organization Bike Newport, where she currently serves as Director of Community Relations and Administration, that she started cycling again.