A native of San Francisco, he founded the stockbrokerage firm Greene and Co. there but spent the last 43 years of his life in Monterey, California.

His boyhood home in Ashland Place, which his parents had imported from China and re-assembled in San Francisco, was known as "The Chinese House".

His stay in France was cut short by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and after a visit to England he returned to San Francisco to study at the Pacific Business College.

On his return to San Francisco he briefly held a clerical position at George Babcock & Co., large dealers in produce and grain.

Designed in an eclectic Moorish Revival style, the house still stands today and is one earliest surviving residences in New Monterey.

Greene was 80 years old when he saw the successful culmination of his twenty-year campaign for the building of a breakwater to protect Monterey harbor.

At considerable personal expense, Greene, who became known as "Breakwater Harry," had lobbied both the California State Legislature and the US Congress for the necessary funds.

At a ceremony in 1932 to mark the start of the breakwater's construction Greene pulled the lever which sent the first granite boulders into the bay.

Greene found more desirable land for the new school which the city had wanted to build on the site of Colton Hall and organized a public subscription to raise money for its purchase.

On Arbor Day 1925, the city honored his work with the planting of a Sequoia sempervirens in the park surrounding Colton Hall.Greene died at his home in Monterey on November 13, 1933, at the age of 81.

[1][9] Greene's interest in horticulture began in boyhood when the English botanist Thomas Bridges was a resident in his parents' house in Ashland Place.

By the end of his life, the gardens contained one of the state's largest private collections of trees and shrubs—over 400 varieties—all of which Greene had marked and scientifically classified.

[13][10] In addition to his forestry activities, Greene was one of the earliest hybridizers of fuchsias which he extensively cultivated in the gardens of his mansion.