Join us at the Discovery Center at Point Breeze Sunday July 27 at 2pm to learn how our garden provides nourishment to the local Bordentown community!
At the Discovery Center at Point Breeze, the historic garden has been reactivated from its original part of the Bonaparte Estate behind Bonaparte’s Gardener’s House since its preservation in 2020. Growing vegetables from heirloom seeds accurate to the time period of the early to mid 1800s, the D&R Greenway Land Trust donates nearly everything produced to local community kitchens through Christ Church of Bordentown.
Doan Tucker organizes all these efforts, and several others each year. Our lead gardener, Brooke McMinn, delivers vegetables as they are harvested throughout the season, to Doan who preps them for nourishing meals to locals in need in Bordentown and surrounding communities.
Early in 2020, a couple of her friends and neighbors nominated her for the Burlington County Outstanding Woman of the Year Award. “Someone, maybe Harry Truman, said, ’It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit,’” said Tucker in her acceptance speech video. “I try to stay behind the scenes and help others become leaders.”
The Tucker family fled Vietnam near the end of the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s. For much of her early life, Tucker lived the life of a refugee, moving from California to Vancouver to Toronto to Northern Virginia, where she met Father Matt, then a student at a local seminary.
When the couple moved to Bordentown, Tucker was looking for the home she never had. She found it by trying to help people in difficult situations — people that she saw herself in. “There’s a huge need and if I’m able to help fill some voids and move things along, that’s why I do it,” she said. “I often wake up and ask, what else can I do today?”
Join us to learn more about our historic garden’s impact on our local community. Hear directly from Doan Tucker and her program assistants Courtney Pelikan and Jack Magnelli. Experience the ingredients, recipes, tools, and cooking methods they use to prepare delicious meals from our fresh heirloom produce.
