This city's secret garden

"When this old world starts getting me down

and people are just too much for me to face...

I've found a paradise that's trouble proof."

Unlike in the Carole King song of old, though, this paradise isn't right smack dab in the middle of town, nor is it up on anybody's roof. It's just a biscuit toss from downtown Durham at the Farmers' Market in Central Park.

You can drive up and down Foster Street every single day, as I do, and not know the Grace Garden is there, offering a shady urban oasis to weary workers who need to recharge their batteries before returning to work or, if your fancy turns to romance, a bucolic place to court a new Sweet Thang or apologize to the old one for forgetting her birthday. Or her mother's birthday. Or her mother's cat's birthday.

The area would still be unknown to me had it not been for a recent meeting with Camille Berry.

Berry, executive director of Durham Central Park Inc., on a recent brutally cold morning -- OK, it was 40 degrees, but when you're from Rockingham, that's brutally cold -- insisted on taking me for a walk around the recently rejuvenated area that two years ago was most renowned for three D's: druggies, derelicts and the green-topped The Dog House hot dog hut.

Now it's a place where you can bring the family to a park in which the kids can play and climb on a giant turtle or a Saturday farmers' market where you can gather fruits and vegetables. Plans for the area include, Berry said, a skateboarding park and mixed-use buildings that'll combine retail and residential.

There is even a garden where you can pick herbs such as cilantro, rosemary and thyme to season your salads. The herbs are free, but as Berry implored, don't go down there and pick all of the stuff for yourself: leave some for the rest of us.

Berry said the park and garden grew out of a "public meeting in 1994 that included architects, urban planners and landscape architects who were looking for a way to revitalize" the area.

"The consensus was that, to revitalize a neighborhood, there needed to be a focal point. An obvious focal point would be a park."

The improvements made in what used to be ugly weed patches on either side of Foster Street are easy to see -- the pavilion, well-kept lawn, the scenic bridge passing over a stream. But viewed from a passing car, the Grace Garden -- located directly behind the pavilion and named after popular community personality Grace Richardson, who was killed in a car wreck in 1999 -- looks merely like a sliver of trees and brush.

Up close, though, you can see the landscaping, the seating areas and the paths that make it an ideal spot to chill.