In New Jersey, a Little Acre of Unsung Plants Craig Terry for The New York Times Hella and Allen Lacy inspect a camellia, Lu Shan Snow. EXCEPT for a fallen Japanese cedar and some battered zinnias, Hurricane Sandy did little damage to the Linwood Arboretum, where 200 trees and shrubs continue to thrive in near oblivion on a single acre. If you haven't heard of the arboretum, that isn't surprising. This little triangle of unusual plants, cinched in between a bike path and a couple of one-way streets, is so small that even in Linwood, most people don't notice it. As Allen Lacy, a former garden columnist for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal who helped start the project five years ago, likes to say, "This is the smallest arboretum in the world." Mr. Lacy, who lives down the street, hasn't exactly scoured the world for a smaller one, but he has a point: most arboretums tend to be several hundred acres with thousands of plants. On a chilly afternoon a few days after the storm, the camellias were still in bloom. A fat bud on a towering hibiscus promised one more enormous pink flower; the dark pods of the black cotton plants were bursting with satiny white seeds. There wasn't an overused forsythia or Bradford pear in sight. This little patch of ground is all about diversity: a dozen kinds of magnolias; a half-dozen witch hazels; 15 camellias; crape myrtles that will age into sinuous trunks with exfoliating bark; deciduous holly trees loaded with red and yellow berries; dwarf pines and ginkgos as big as medium-size dogs. Those who know the garden, like Frank Rudnesky, the principal of the Belhaven Middle School across the street, have their favorites, even if they don't know them by name. "I like that plant that blooms in the winter," he said. What's it called? Yeah, witch hazel, that's the one. Jelena, which opens its fragrant orange flowers in January, has a spicy scent; the Chinese species, Hamamelis mollis, which covers itself with yellow confetti-like flowers, smells more like vanilla. It wasn't all that long ago, though, that "it used to be a big plot of nothing," Mr. Rudnesky said. But now, every science teacher goes over there to ID plants. On a nice day, especially when we get that ocean breeze, classes go out there for reflective writing and art. Just five years ago, this was a defunct electrical substation surrounded by barbed wire and cyclone fencing. The concrete building - now painted red, with a white pergola and trumpet vine winding up its posts - was filled with insulator coils and electrical equipment. The city had acquired the property in 2002, then spent years mulling over what to do with it. It considered an outdoor movie theater, but neighbors objected because of noise and parking. Dog lovers wanted a dog park. By the spring of 2007, the city was leaning toward a sports field. That's when Mr. Lacy showed up at a public meeting. Mr. Lacy, who is now 77, had taught philosophy for 27 years at Richard Stockton College, in Galloway, N.J., and written a dozen books on gardening, most of which are still dog-eared favorites of serious gardeners. And like many, he was inspired by J. C. Raulston, the late plantsman and horticulture professor at North Carolina State University, who started an eight-acre arboretum there on a shoestring and spent his life bringing unusual plants to gardeners. "I was impressed by his lament that 90 percent of American home landscaping used only 40 plants," said Mr. Lacy, who visited the fledgling arboretum in 1985, and put the man who made it on the map by writing about him. "This arboretum is entirely J. C."s legacy, and many of the plants here are ones that he championed." He was skeptical about the electric company's assurance that the land was not polluted, he told the City Council. "You do not want your children scuffing around in there," he said at the time. "If you've read "An Enemy of the People" or "Death in Venice," you know that cities don't want to say they're polluted." The response, as he remembers it, was basically, " "What would you put there, Smartypants?" And I said, "An arboretum." " A City Council member, Ralph Paolone, asked, "What's that?"