FRED ROSENSTIEL, 83,

DEVOTED HIS LIFE TO PLANTING FLOWERS

Fred Rosenstiel, who spent his life planting gardens to brighten the lives of his fellow New Yorkers, and to alleviate an abiding sadness in his heart, died on Tuesday at the Western Queens Community Hospital in Astoria. He was 83 and lived recently in Astoria.

In a city where corps of volunteer gardeners seem to spring up like wildflowers, Mr. Rosenstiel was a volunteer gardener with a difference, a man so driven that for four decades he did little else.

Since arriving in New York in 1951, Mr. Rosenstiel, the son of a prosperous Dutch businessman who left him enough money to live on, had made gardens, coaxing green shoots of life from the New York soil.

“He was a master plantsman,” said Barbara Earnest, the director of the New York Horticultural Society, recalling Mr. Rosenstiel as the city’s most dedicated and prolific volunteer gardener, one who lent his expertise and his brawn to community gardening groups and worked on his own to plant flowers on virtually any patch of unpaved earth in the city.

Whether part of a group or working alone, Mr. Rosenstiel, whose name means “rose stalk” in German, planted gardens in parks, vacant lots, schools, housing projects, hospitals and homeless shelters.

A founder of the Green Guerillas, a group that has organized and tended hundreds of community gardens since 1973, he was also an unpaid consultant to the New York City Council on the Environment and to many other organizations.

A longtime resident of the Upper West Side, he would leave his apartment on West 113th Street at 8 a.m.and would rarely be home before midnight, sometimes visiting three or more community gardens in a day.

When he was not on his knees, digging his hands into the earth to root out Japanese knotweed threatening a garden in Riverside Park or planting the yellow flowering lamium he knew would thrive in the ubiquitous New York shade, Mr. Rosenstiel, a tall, powerfully built man with granite features, could often be found immersed in a newspaper at a Broadway coffee shop.

Known as a sad man who found an elusive joy in gardening and music, Mr. Rosenstiel became a familiar figure on the Upper West Side, a neighborhood character in a beret and tweed jacket who carried a shopping bag crammed with gardening equipment and made it a point of honor never to travel anywhere except by subway.

He often held court at the old Mill Luncheonette at 111th Street and Broadway, where he would harangue Columbia University students, often urging them to adopt surprisingly radical positions.

They called him “the Professor.”

“Perhaps I would have had a more interesting career had I been forced to make a living,” he once told a friend, before adding, “These are the ironies of life.”

Mr. Rosenstiel was on intimate terms with such ironies. In his family the ironies twisted back on themselves.

His parents were German Jews who immigrated to England, where they suffered such anti-German prejudice during World War I that they moved to the Netherlands.

Mr. Rosenstiel, who was born in London and grew up there and in Rotterdam before going to school in Switzerland, was the only member of his family who survived the Nazis.

His only brother was killed fighting as a soldier with the Dutch Army. His parents and several aunts, uncles and cousins died at Auschwitz.

Mr. Rosenstiel, who was in England at the outbreak of the war and who later served four years as a seaman with the Britain-based Dutch Navy, seemed to find it hard to forgive himself for surviving the Holocaust, friends said. He felt such guilt, he once told a friend, that he felt he was not entitled to any happiness.

That, he explained, is why he never married, never pursued a career. He simply planted gardens, a delight he had stumbled on at a cooperative London youth hostel when he volunteered to tend its garden as a way of getting out of doing the dishes.

In his later years he found a measure of comfort with Esther Lazarson, a woman who had loved him since the day they met in 1969 and who took him in when he became too sick to care for himself four years ago.

Ms. Lazarson, a native of England who has lived in New York off and on since 1951, recalled yesterday that Mr. Rosenstiel had once offered her a white begonia if she would stay in New York, but she wanted more than he was prepared to give at the time. He had learned from the Holocaust, she said, how much you can lose and how quickly when you love too much.

“He gave me a white begonia when I came back,” she added.

June 16, 1995