Richie Haugland, who has maintained the Washington Market Park gardens for the past decade and is responsible for the explosion of tulips that color the park every spring — go check them out today! — is retiring from the Parks Department after 26 years. His last day will be May 2; come wish him well at the Friends of Washington Market Park’s planting day on Saturday (scheduled for 10:30a).

“I’ve loved it here,” Richie said. “This is a really healthy community — a real neighborhood park. Every park has its own life — its own feel. And I have loved the work here.”

Richie grew up in Borough Park and for the first half of his working career was a menswear accessory buyer for Lester’s. In the ’90s, he would volunteer on the weekends in a community garden in Bay Ridge, which is where he met then-Brooklyn Borough Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel — he instructed him to get a job at the Parks Department.

By then Richie was 40 and was ready for a change. He signed up for night school at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, getting his certificate in horticulture over the next two years.

“It was a mid-life crisis,” he said.

He was hired by Parks in 1999 (he knew Commissioner Henry Stern — Richie’s family used to get their camping gear and cub scout uniforms from Stern’s parents’ store in Brooklyn) and was assigned to Union Square as the assistant gardener. That fall they offered him the full gardener job at the newly renovated City Hall Park, where he stayed for 15 years.

“Working for Parks, I made less money, I had fewer perks and there was no prestige. But I loved the work. It was worth every tradeoff. It’s so important in life to enjoy what you’re doing.”

He came to Washington Market Park in 2014, and has loved this assignment, but he is ready to retire. He’s 66 (“My mind says I’m 18 but my body says I’m clearly not”), he said his knees are shot, and he can’t keep up with the work they way he wants to do it. (He still plants 15,000 tulip bulbs every fall, digging up the old ones so he can recreate a color scheme every year.)

And he has things he wants to do: visit the classic gardens of Europe (Dublin is his first stop this summer); finally learn Spanish; return to teaching at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as he did before covid. And he wants to start creating what he calls sensory gardens at the city’s courthouses as a place for jurors to decompress. “There’s therapy for the victims and even for the perpetrators, but there’s no outlet for the jurors. There’s no calming place for them and they have to hear some horrific stuff.”

He will, of course, garden. His tastes have changed over the years, and he has come to value native plants that attract native bugs and therefore native birds. And while the tulips are still the showstopper (he planted them here, he said, because a children’s park needs color), his favorite right now is the flying dragon: bright green with an architectural feel in winter, orange blossoms and white flowers in spring, fruit that looks like fuzzy orange ping pong balls in fall.

“It’s a plant that has a lot of multi-seasonal interest,” he notes. “At this point in my life, I’m appreciating that more.”