In 1995, Bette Midler returned to New York City and was disturbed by what she saw in some of its neglected parks: piles of garbage, abandoned cars, discarded appliances and years of accumulated debris.

She decided to start cleaning.

Midler recruited friends and family to help remove trash from Fort Tryon and Fort Washington parks in northern Manhattan. That hands-on effort grew into the New York Restoration Project, the nonprofit she founded that year to restore parks and green spaces, particularly in neighborhoods that had received less investment.

Some of the early cleanups were enormous. In Highbridge Park, NYRP crews and volunteers helped uncover more than four miles of pathways buried beneath years of debris. They removed abandoned cars, 8,000 tires and 481 tons of trash.

Then Midler's project moved beyond cleaning parks to protecting green spaces.

When New York City prepared to auction scores of community garden lots in the late 1990s, NYRP became involved in preserving them. The organization eventually acquired dozens of com

munity gardens, protecting spaces that neighborhood residents had spent years cultivating.

Midler also became an important force behind one of the largest urban tree-planting campaigns in the country. NYRP partnered with New York City on MillionTreesNYC, an effort launched in 2007 to plant one million new trees across the five boroughs. The millionth tree went into the ground in 2015, two years ahead of schedule.

Thirty years after Midler started picking up trash, NYRP now stewards more than 80 acres of parkland, owns and operates more than 50 community gardens, and has planted more than 200,000 trees through its own work.

It has also removed more than 6 million pounds of trash and built or renovated more than 300 green spaces.

For someone whose career was built on commanding a stage, one of Bette Midler's more lasting performances may be taking place quietly across New York, in parks, gardens and beneath the shade of thousands of trees.