83-year-old lives a unique lifestyle by surrounding herself with everything green

There are hardly any individuals out there who don't have an obsession or fascination with something. Whether it is an activity, collecting things or in this case, a color, we are always trying our best to integrate our passion into our day-to-day lives. However, it seems no one has quite accomplished doing that more than Elizabeth Sweetheart. Sweetheart is otherwise famously known as "The Green Lady of Brooklyn" and has attained local celebrity status for displaying her love for the color green, per the New York Times.

For more than the past 20 years, Sweetheart has been dressing up head to toe in various shades of green. The 83-year-old fine artist not only dyes her hair with bright lime green highlights, but she strictly wears green clothing and accessories as well. “I’ve just become green; I can’t wear any other color,” she told the outlet in an interview while sitting at her townhouse on Nelson Street. Even her residence is covered in a shade of green, including the doors, window frames, walls, carpets and furniture.

Sweetheart doesn't stop at just that. The green rug on her kitchen floor, trash can, utensils, cutting boards and saucepans are all of the same color. Her coffee cups, oatmeal cartons, vitamin pill case, scrubbing sponges and even the knobs on the kitchen cabinet couldn't escape the green wave unleashed by Sweetheart in her surroundings. “It’s funny how you collect a few things and then it keeps growing,” Sweetheart joked about her evergreen passion. On the professional front, she has been an artist who makes finely painted watercolor art pieces for decades and creates hand-painted prints for famous clothing designers and manufacturers.

She had first attracted the attention of fellow commuters when she used to board the F train to and from her office in Manhattan. “They’ll say, ‘You know, that’s my favorite color,’ and they’re all wearing black,” Sweetheart recalled. She has been working from home for a while now and she also collects and sells vintage materials. “I’m always doing things to keep happy and green is just the most positive color and the happiest,” Sweetheart continues about how she is a sight that is hard to miss in the neighborhood when she goes out to run her errands.

“If you Google Green Lady and Brooklyn, you’ll find the Statue of Liberty and my mother,” her son Sam Eaton mentioned to the outlet. The jolly old lady was born Elizabeth Eaton in Nova Scotia and was raised by her grandparents in a cabin near the Bay of Fundy, where her grandmother taught her to paint and make clothing. She had an opportunity to study with Canadian painter Alex Colville when she went to finish college. Sweetheart decided to start hitchhiking in 1964 and reached New York City to find a career as an artist and started creating prints for the garment industry.

Her passion for green did not bloom in a single day. Sweetheart experimented with various colors and vintage dresses and self-designed hats and finally settled on living a green lifestyle. “Maybe it was because I grew up in Nova Scotia and after moving to New York, I missed having green all around me,” she recalled. She gave a tour of the rest of her house to the news outlet and showed how everything, from her bed to the green linens and her entire closet, was filled with nothing but green materials. “You open anything, it’s all green,” she said, “Anything.”

“I never planned for any of this to happen,” she explained, “It’s not an obsession. It just happened naturally. I’ve always used color, collected color.” Sweetheart isn't just limiting herself to incorporating the green color inside her home and on herself; she also has a sprawling backyard full of fig trees, tomatoes, eggplants and various herbs. It seems like the green lady has a green thumb as well. "The green theme is not simply fun and games. It helps me get through the hard times, too. The brain surgeon loved my green hair, so he didn’t shave my head when he operated, which was unusual. He took care to let me keep my green hair,” concluded Sweetheart, who went through two surgeries.