Visiting New York City can be a quiet, restful experience.
Really.
The very definition of hustle, bustle and endless miles of concrete, New York also contains some of the finest oases in any city to escape urban syndrome.
Stroll into the swail that surrounds the Rose Garden in the New York Botanical Garden and you never can imagine that a gritty section of the Bronx is all around. Watch the heron flit from perch to perch in the fish pond of the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the traffic noise beyond the walls melts away.
Find 249th Street in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and watch the sun set over the Palisades on the opposite side of the Hudson River. You would think the swath of green on top of the bluff on the eastern shore, known as Wave Hill, must be a national park in a state far away.
Long Island has many richly landscaped estates, including two that have been turned into state-owned preserves. Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay boasts a fine collection of trees and an entire greenhouse complex filled with camellias that a one-time owner brought from England. He found the climate too rigorous for them and built the glass houses to allow him to grow his favorite shrubs.
Thirty minutes away, Old Westbury Gardens is a formal estate garden featuring a magnificent walled garden and a stunning allee of beech trees on 100 acres.
Manhattan has earned a reputation of concrete and high-rises, but New Yorkers have found unique ways of using what space they do have. Look skyward from almost any vantage point to balconies and one is almost sure to see some kind of plants swaying in the breeze. Rooftop gardening is practiced as an art form here, perhaps the pinnacle being the seven acres maintained in the Rockefeller Center complex.
Seven stories above 5th Avenue in several of the Rockefeller Center buildings are gardens that are not open to the public, that exist solely for those whose offices look down from above. The simple but elegant landscaping includes lawn areas surrounded by shaped evergreens and geraniums. The Channel Garden in the plaza below guides visitors to the famous statue and fountain that doubles as the ice-skating rink in the winter.
”It`s horticultural theater,” said David Murbach, manager of the gardens division for the last six years, as he surveyed the delicate wildflowers set temporarily in hidden pots in the Channel Garden. They will be changed as they go out of flower and a new color scheme implemented.
”This being New York, they tell you what they think,” he said of the 200,000 visitors a year to the park.
Throughout Manhattan are pocket parks that contain fountains and greenery, and many of the most famous buildings are as famous for their atrium plantings as they are for the amount of granite and glass.
The Ford Foundation Building, on West 43rd Street, ”is considered one of the granddaddies of landscaped interiors,” said John Mini, the landscaper who oversees care of the parklike setting.
”You get a feeling of a nature preserve, a feeling that is always dramatic and always relaxing. When the building opened in the `60s, it was called a horticultural spectacle and a timeless monument in the New York Times.”
North of midtown is Central Park, certainly famous in its own right, but also the home of the Conservatory Garden, the only formal lawn area in the huge park. A conservatory usually is defined as a greenhouse, but this conservatory, on the Upper East Side at 103rd Street, is completely outdoors. It has its own foundation so maintenance won`t be in jeopardy if tax funding fails to match needs.
Between midtown and the financial hub of Wall Street to the south is Greenwich Village, where streets become a tangle and tiny parks are possible for enterprising community groups.
One such garden, the Sheridan Square Viewing Garden, is a narrow triangle reclaimed from a paved asphalt strip. The garden has a board of directors, a director of gardening and even a historian. It also has chains around some of its larger shrubs that vandals think have value.
Here`s a rundown of what to see and where they are located in and around the Big Apple. Because of state and city budget cuts, some entrance fees may change from the rates given here.
– The New York Botanical Garden. World-famous institution featuring the quintessential horticultural library and global research program. The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, modeled on the conservatory at Kew Gardens in London, encloses an acre and is equally famous, although a 1977 renovation has not stood the test of time and the space will be closed again at the end of 1992 for another facelift.
The garden is not as hard to reach from Manhattan as it might seem. It has its own shuttle bus service that leaves three times a day from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it is a 20-minute trip on the Metro-North Commuter line, running roughly every half hour from Grand Central Station (ask about a Botanic Garden package fare that includes admission to the conservatory); and there are signs directing motorists from either the Henry Hudson Parkway or the Bronx River Parkway. An on-site lot holds 300 cars ($4), and more parking is available at Fordham University next door on major weekends. Two restaurants and an excellent gift shop are on the grounds.
The garden is open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission to the grounds by donation; the Haupt Conservatory, which closes at 5 p.m., is $3.50 for adults, $1.25 for seniors and children. A tram roams the grounds about every 20 minutes; 50 cents. 212-220-8700.
– The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is a completely different scale, comprising 52 acres, compared to NYBG`s 300. Its plantings are more intense, but there are plenty of walkways where the surrounding city can be left behind. Its Children`s Garden was started in 1914 as the first teaching garden cultivated by children in any botanic garden. It also claims the first fragrance garden. The Steinhardt Conservatory, dedicated in 1988 at a cost of $25 million, is sleek and modern. Its aquatic garden not only is visible from above but also includes viewing windows on a lower level so visitors may study the underwater environment.
Next door is the restored Palm House, used primarily as a special events center, and the gift shop. Among its many books are the famous Brooklyn Botanic Garden gardening handbooks, of which there are now more than 100.
The BBG, at 1000 Washington Ave., is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekends, closed non-holiday Mondays. Admission is free; the Steinhardt Conservatory closes an hour earlier; $2 for adults, $1 for seniors, children and students. Parking is onsite ($5) in a lot shared with the Brooklyn Museum next door. The subway, the No. 2 or 3 IRT Line, stops in front of the entrance. 718-622-4433.
– Wave Hill`s 28 acres are landscaped in a park-type setting with two major homes serving as anchors. The estate once served as home to Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and Arturo Toscanini. A conservatory is maintained, and specialty plant collections are contained within the stone foundations of what were other greenhouses. One greenhouse that has been kept houses a collection of tiny rock garden plants.
Wave Hill is at Independence Avenue and 249th Street in the Bronx. It is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily (slightly later on Wednesday and Sunday). Weekday admission is free; admission on weekends and holidays is $2 adults, $1 seniors and students. Public transportation: Metro-North Hudson line from Grand Central Station to the Riverdale stop (20 minutes), walk up the hill, right on Independence Avenue. To drive, it is less than a minute from the Henry Hudson Parkway, 246-250th Street exit if coming from the south, 254th Street exit from the north. Parking is free. 212-549-3200.
– Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay, Long Island, was the home of businessman William R. Coe, who came from England with a typical English love of plants, especially rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias. The 65-room Tudor- revival mansion, Coe Hall, was completed in 1921 to replace a frame home that burned. In 1949, Coe deeded the grounds to the state of New York.
The 406-acre grounds contain magnificent specimen trees and a shrub garden where plants are laid out alphabetically as a study tool.
The arboretum is open every day. Admission is free. Coe Hall is open from 12:30 to 3:30 Monday through Friday; $2 adult, $1 seniors and children. From either the Long Island Expressway or the Northern State Parkway, take the Hicksville-Jerico exit north and follow New York Highway 106 to Oyster Bay. Turn left at New York Highway 25A and right at Mill River Road and follow the signs. Parking is $3. 516-922-0479.
– Old Westbury Gardens is maintained ”as close as we can make it to the way it was in 1909” when John S. Phipps, who inherited a steel fortune, and his family lived there, said Nelson Sterner, horticultural superintendent. The estate was opened as a public garden in 1959. Old Westbury`s Charles II mansion is surrounded by formal gardens that give way to magnificent forested vistas. The multi-level walled garden leads to a turnaround at a large pool.
The gardens are open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday through October. Admission is $4.50 and $1 for children. Westbury House admission is $3, children $1.50. Senior rates are $3.50 for both. No dogs allowed. From the Long Island Expressway, take Glen Cove Road, Exit 39S, follow the service road eastbound for 1.2 miles, turn right on Old Westbury Road. 516-333-0048.
