Press Clip
New York Times
Friday, April 27, 2007
(Excerpt)
By PAULA DEITZ (NYT); Leisure/Weekend Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section E, Page 25, Column 3, 1896 words
Finally, New York's trees and gardens, so long stuck in a kind of suspended animation, have shaken off winter. When the rain ended abruptly last week, the whole city burst into bloom simultaneously rather than in the usual sequential order. Now's the moment to get outside, walk on the city's side streets under canopies of white Callery pears and head for a favorite spot to see your favorite spring blooms, or just to sit in the newly green grass.
Central Park's woodland setting may be pure artifice, but when those first green shoots and purple crocuses poke through the brown blanket of fallen leaves, they appear like a tender hope. The crocuses have already come and gone, as have the cascades of chrome-yellow forsythia flowing over massive stone retaining walls.
Now though, you can dash -- as I have in the last few days -- from park to park around the city, seeking out favorite sites and exploring new ones, to take in spring at the height of its showiness. But catch it quickly -- it's glorious but fleeting. Here are prime spots to soak up the season. (Some gardens charge admission; more information is available on the Web sites below.)
Finally, New York's trees and gardens, so long stuck in a kind of suspended animation, have shaken off winter. When the rain ended abruptly last week, the whole city burst into bloom simultaneously rather than in the usual sequential order. Now's the moment to get outside, walk on the city's side streets under canopies of white Callery pears and head for a favorite spot to see your favorite spring blooms, or just to sit in the newly green grass.
Central Park's woodland setting may be pure artifice, but when those first green shoots and purple crocuses poke through the brown blanket of fallen leaves, they appear like a tender hope. The crocuses have already come and gone, as have the cascades of chrome-yellow forsythia flowing over massive stone retaining walls.
Now though, you can dash -- as I have in the last few days -- from park to park around the city, seeking out favorite sites and exploring new ones, to take in spring at the height of its showiness. But catch it quickly -- it's glorious but fleeting. Here are prime spots to soak up the season. (Some gardens charge admission; more information is available on the Web sites below.)
Central Park Reservoir
During Kyoto's sakura or cherry blossom viewing season, the pale Yoshino cherries are the trees that line the canal along Philosopher's Walk, where blossoms drift away on the water. In New York the treat is to observe the clear blue sky through a foam of blossoms above the gnarled gray trunks.
While there are many allées around town of the double pink cherry blossoms (Kwanzan), a stroll around the park's 1.6-mile reservoir affords a chance for total immersion in vast groves as they arch over the path on the West Side. Seen from the East Side, especially at dusk, they appear as a blur of cloud formations over the spiked silhouette of the reservoir's pretty cast-iron and steel ornamental fence. Beyond the stands of cotton candy pink are other varieties of cherry, branching out splendidly, with names like Okame, Sargent and Mount Fuji.
Conservatory Garden, Central Park
This seems to be everyone's private garden, blessedly public, with corners to match every mood: protected corners for reflection, exuberant sunny spaces and playful fountains. Right now spring is unfolding on woodland slopes in the south garden with a mélange of scilla, Chionodoxa luciliae and pulmonaria, punctuated by brilliant splashes of daffodils.
In the English-style garden below, magnolia trees, both soulangeana and stellata, anchor corners of the planting beds, where grape hyacinth and anemone blanda hold their own along the borders against pristine, serpentine hedges that form the bones of the garden. Next to the entrance, a collection of hellebores in various shades of green to pink is an outstanding feature of the south garden. The dramatic central allées of crab apples in dark pink and white are in bloom, and their blossoms will soon blend with the shades of 21,000 purple, pink and white tulips planted in abstract waves in the north garden around French-style parterres of clipped germander scrolls. No wonder brides flock here to be photographed.
Fifth Avenue and 105th Street, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., through Monday; 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., May through August (closed this Wednesday).
The Frick Collection
Among the first signs of spring is the blossoming of three magnolias along the classical facade of the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue. Stately and beautifully pruned, they are best viewed from inside, looking out from the Fragonard Room, where you are transported back to Jean-Honoré Fragonard's own 18th-century salon in Provence. That's where he hung the bucolic wall panels depicting ''The Progress of Love,'' an elegant romp of lovers through garden scenes that appeared seamless with the garden landscape outside the windows, as they do now at the Frick. From behind the transparent curtains, a visitor can imagine inhabiting a chateau of one's own, with the luxury of enjoying the frothy pink landscapes inside and out. On the Frick's east side, a facade of arched niches and Ionic pilasters surrounds Russell Page's formal French garden, where wisteria will soon be trailing along the trellises.
1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-1700, frick.org; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sundays; closed Mondays and holidays.
The Shakespeare Garden, Central Park
The Shakespeare Garden's original purpose (though no longer followed to the letter) was to feature flowers mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays and poetry. Planted along a steep, rocky slope beneath Belvedere Castle, the garden paths wind between the Delacorte Theater and the Marionette Cottage. With its rustic benches and fences, it has the character of a medieval garden. Sadly, an ancient mulberry tree, an anchor of the garden, fell last year, but the beds are filled now with a tapestry of spring blooms: tulips, hyacinth, crocuses and primroses. Watching spring emerge here, or summer or fall, for that matter, is itself a kind of theater.
Enter Central Park from 79th Street and Central Park West.
The Cloisters
Spring arrived at the Cloisters last week when the glass panes were removed from the arcades of the Cuxa Cloister that protected fragile plants like olive, jasmine, orange and bay, wintering over in the inner walkway. They are taken outdoors to the Bonnefont Cloister, where four quince trees at its center are about to blossom, in delicate white with a pink cast, above beds of hellebores. Also in bloom nearby are two pear trees espaliered in the six-arm palmette form.
Susan Moody, the horticulturist for the last 28 years, is stepping down, leaving a legacy of orderly medieval beauty based on meticulous research going back to Charlemagne's ninth-century account of species on his estates. Most recently, she added a flowering meadow below the high back wall overlooking the Hudson River, planted with Lady Apple trees, caraway poppies, bachelor buttons, daffodils and a spirea hedge, promising riotous color as the season progresses.
Fort Tryon Park (212) 923-3700, metmuseum.org. 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., Tuesdays through Sundays.
Wave Hill
As a public garden surrounding a formerly private estate on the Hudson River, Wave Hill retains a domestic scale with a fine horticultural tradition. At the moment, the low-growing flower called Glory-of-the-snow (Chionodoxa sardensis) blankets the hillsides and garden areas in a cool wave of gentian blue occasionally mixed with the froth of a white variety. Along the irregular paths of the hillside Wild Garden, dominated by yews clipped in cloud formations, plants are making daily appearances in artful juxtapositions: purple pulmonaria; species tulips in yellow striped with red; grape hyacinths and hellebores from creamy yellow to a deep purple.
West 249th Street and Independence Avenue, Riverdale, the Bronx, (718) 549-3200, wavehill.org. Tuesdays through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
New York Botanical Garden
Designed by the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, a doyenne of the British horticultural world, the garden has created for the first time an Auricula Theater, a display on narrow shelves of rare cultivars of velvety primroses under a proscenium arch surrounded by painted wooden swags of drapery (through May 13). Since the yellow alpine Primula auricula was crossed with the red and blue Primula hirsute in the 16th century to produce a spectrum of purple and yellow petals and centers, a fad developed for these cultivars among 17th-century Huguenot weavers in France and Belgium. They devised showcase theaters to protect the fragile plants from the elements. The triumphant results of this difficult horticultural technique may also be seen in ''Primrose Palette,'' an exhibition of hundreds of auriculas in the display house of the Mitchell/Giurgola Nolen Greenhouses.
200th Street and Kazimiroff Boulevard, Bedford Park, the Bronx, (718) 817-8700, nybg.org. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Staten Island Botanical Garden
In this tranquil, 15th-century-style Ming Dynasty garden, every tree and plant is treated as a singular work of art. As you wander through courtyards into a teahouse and across bridges to the moon-viewing pavilion, each tree becomes memorable for its shape and branching pattern seen against white-washed walls as part of the garden's decorative scheme.
This week Korean azalea, a low Chinese redbud tree and red berries of the nandina shrub, along with a yellow magnolia, bring texture and color to the stark spaces. As at the Frick, you have the sense of inhabiting these pavilions, built by Chinese artisans. Elsewhere in the Staten Island Botanical Garden, there is a major collection of tree peonies coming into bloom.
1000 Richmond Terrace, Livingston, Staten Island, (718) 273-8200, sibg.org. Grounds open daily dawn to dusk; Scholar's Garden, Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
On my early spring walks with Judith D. Zuk, former president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, she would pause by the yellow magnolias, her favorites, on the garden's famous Magnolia Plaza, bearing her name since 2005. At that time the garden also presented her with the newly named cultivar Magnolia x Judy Zuk, a golden yellow with a flush of plum at its base that is in bloom this week, along with other yellow magnolias like Elizabeth, Marilyn and Yellow Bird.
This weekend the garden celebrates Sakura Matsuri, the Cherry Blossom Festival, on its grand Cherry Esplanade. But perhaps no view equals the serene beauty of a single branch of a weeping cherry seen against the orange torii gate in the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, reminiscent of blossoms against the orange woodwork of the Heian Shrine in Kyoto.
1000 Washington Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, (718) 623-7200, bbg.org. Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.; weekends and holidays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Jefferson Market Garden
Greenwich Village is dotted with public squares and community gardens that offer respite in that neighborhood. The Jefferson Market Garden, in the lee of the old Victorian Gothic courthouse, now public library, is a vision both for those who enter and also those who walk by its iron fence. With 12 trees, a central oval lawn, a pond and an intricate pattern of walkways, the garden appears more expansive than its one-third acre. The central yellowwood was Andy Warhol's favorite tree, but if you go right now, you'll find a bounty of Spanish bluebells, windflowers, scilla, tulips and daffodils, many as underplantings to blossoming magnolias and cherries. Coming soon: crabapples. A buttery yellow kerria or Japanese rose will remain in bloom all summer.
Greenwich Avenue, between Avenue of the Americas and West 10th Street, Greenwich Village, jeffersonmarketgarden.org. Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to sunset.
The Battery
A view over New York's harbor is always refreshing, but particularly at this time of year, from the vantage of the 25-acre Battery. The Bosque Garden, now in its third season, is emerging as a successful and bucolic example of a sustainable landscape. The undulating beds, planted with naturalized bulbs and perennials, break up the symmetry of the rows of London plane trees. Even this early, magenta primulas, pink and white hyacinth, scilla and Jeffersonia are in bloom. By summer's end, some of the beds will grow to six feet tall, strong enough to hold their own against the harbor. This was, after all, the birthplace of New York as, among other things, a garden city.
Southern tip of Manhattan , adjacent to the South Ferry Terminal, thebattery.org. Always open.
Images: Photos: Aleah Marcelle, 9, of Brooklyn, gets ready for her photo op under a cherry tree at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. (Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times)(pg. E25); Central Park is a prime spot for cherry blossom viewing, to observe the blue sky through a foam of blooms above the gray trunks. (Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times); Yellow magnolias in the Scholar's Garden at Staten Island Botanical Garden. (Photo by Mary DiBiase Blaich for The New York Times); Tulips blooming in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park. (Photo by Kelly Shimoda for The New York Times); Alex Gomez with a magnolia blossom at Corlears Hook Park, Lower East Side. (Photo by Michael Falco for The New York Times)(pg. E34)
Map of New Jersey and New York City border highlighting points of interest this Spring. (pg. E34)
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
