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GREENSBORO - Norman Smith has finished planting his garden beside his house.

It's not much. But it will be.

He's planted fruit trees, blackberries and at least a half-dozen vegetables - lettuce, onions, spinach and even Chinese cabbage - in a raised bed hemmed in by a winding stone wall.

Beneath the wall, on a small stone patio, you'll find two benches, a trickling fountain and a round tin, Christmas green, that'll make you curious. Why? It's the words on the lid: "Food For The Soul."

Open it and you'll find two pocket-size books. One is about an acorn-planting shepherd who teaches us about hope; the other is about the son of a carpenter who teaches us about humanity.

Norman, a father of four, a grandfather of six, goes there often. He wants you to come, too.

Smith grew up in western North Carolina, where he wandered among the mountains. Today, in the very place where he once hunted and fished, he sees "No Trespassing" signs everywhere he looks.

He hates that.

Smith grew old around gated communities. He felt these gates became barriers that excluded everybody except those living within its walls.

He hated that, too.

So, when he moved last spring into his new house, he figured he could do something with the half-acre lot he bought next to it.

Create a public garden.

He had local stone mason David Printup build the wall. Then Smith - a man born with a green thumb - planted flowers, vegetables and trees to coax people down the hill beside his house.

They've come. When he sees them, he tells them every time, "Just walk in."

And Smith will talk to just about anybody. He practices law.

But that's like saying Jackie Robinson played baseball.

Smith, a graduate of Harvard Law, helped found the American Civil Liberties Union in North Carolina. He's represented everyone from Black Panthers to draft dodgers to members of the Ku Klux Klan.

He's argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court five times, and in Greensboro as well as throughout the state, he's become a mentor to many a young lawyer.

His advice, in a quiet voice you can barely hear in any big courtroom, is always the same: "Just read the statutes and read the cases and figure it out. That is what law is."

But like any of us, Smith is not immune to heartache.

Gay, his college sweetheart and wife of 42 years, died in 2004. She had cancer. She was fine in February; she was gone by November.

In February 2006, Smith spent time in Wesley Long Hospital's intensive care unit for heart problems and needed a pacemaker to stay alive. The next month, his father died at the age of 103.

Then, earlier this year, his second marriage ended in divorce after only a year.

After all that, Smith started anew - at age 70. He left Sedgefield, a place of mansions, and later moved to Greensboro's Lindley Park neighborhood, a picture of middle-class America.

He calls his new two-bedroom home on Collier Street "La Fenice." That's Italian for phoenix, the mythological bird that rises from the ashes. You'll see the word - and the bird - on a metal plate beside Smith's front door.

Four years ago, Smith was baptized in a small Methodist church in the North Carolina mountains. In September,

he became a member of Greensboro's Ebenezer Lutheran Church. Today, he no longer sees the Old Testament as full of myth and metaphor.

He believes it, this logical man of the law. And today, he sees his Christian world and his everyday world as one.

He's reminded of that every day when he looks out and sees his garden. It's where his blackberries and Chinese cabbage will soon start to grow.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com