City Green: Public Gardens of New York

Description

Gardens are an integral part of any cityscape, and New York City boasts a wealth of outdoor spaces that enhance the urban environment and provide visual pleasure to residents and visitors. City Green celebrates the richness and diversity of New York's public gardens. While the New York Botanical Garden, the High Line, and Central Park are familiar names and places, other venues, such as Roosevelt Park, the Inwood Heather Garden, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the Chinese Scholar's Garden, remain relatively under-visited and under-appreciated. In addition to parks and three botanical gardens, public horticulture in New York encompasses community- and conservancy-sponsored gardens, vest pocket parks, museum gardens, and even indoor atria. City Green- Public Gardens of New York focuses on the vitality, variety, and beauty of the city's garden landscapes in a time when the appreciation for how gardens enhance the quality of urban life is on the rise. With text by noted garden writer Jane Garmey and photography by distinguished landscape and design photographer Mick Hales, this book takes readers inside many of New York's gardens, including the Cloisters, Green-Wood Cemetery, Carl Schurz Park, Wave Hill, the 9/11 Memorial Garden, the Noguchi Museum, and the Willis Ave. Community Garden. City Green is an essential companion for New Yorkers and the ideal gift for garden-lovers, tourists, and former New York residents nostalgic for the city's parks and gardens.

Jane Garmey is the author of Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley, Private Gardens of Connecticut (both published by The Monacelli Press), Great British Cooking- A Well-Kept Secret, and Great New British Cooking, and editor of The Writer in the Garden. She has written numerous articles on gardens and interior design for newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Elle Decor, and 1stDibs, and for many years she was the garden correspondent for Town & Country. Mick Hales is a well-known photographer of gardens and landscapes and interior design. He is the author of Gardens Around the World- 365 Days, and the photographer for numerous books, including In the Neoclassic Style (Melanie Fleischmann), Gardens of the World (Penelope Hobhouse and Elvin McDonald with foreword by Audrey Hepburn), The Gardens of California (Nancy Goslee Power), Antique Garden Ornaments (Barbara Israel), 212 Views of Central Park (Sandee Brawarsky), Gardens Private and Personal- A Garden Club of America Book (Nancy D'Oench and Bonny Martin), and Flower Arranging- The American Way (the World Association of Flower Arrangers).

Of course, it honors Central Park's gardens, but it pays attention to plenty of other jewels as well, including the masterfully minimalist Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park at the tip of Roosevelt Island, the blowzy Native Plant Garden at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and Midtown's timelessly elegant and beloved Paley Park. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi's studio and garden in Queens deserves to be counted among America's finest intimate museums. And an authentic classical Chinese garden on Staten Island was a revelation to me; I'm on the next ferry. - New York Times Book Review "A chromatic, idiosyncratic survey of the stand-alone aggregations of plants and trees either within parks or which stand alone as urban sanctuaries. - Sam Roberts, New York Times Twenty-five public parks and gardens located throughout the five boroughs of New York City are featured in Jane Garmey's City Green. The rich mix, captured in magnificent photographs by Mick Hales, includes traditional gardens and contemporary designs, large-scale and small community gardens. - Wall Street Journal ...If you ask people to name some of the top attractions in New York City, the odds are one of their answers will be Central Park. While it's a wonderful space, it is by no means the only place for New Yorkers and tourists to get a taste of nature within city limits - thousands, if not millions, of people visit some of the city's other well-known offerings, like the New York Botanical Garden and the High Line. And further still, there are dozens of other green spaces spread across the five boroughs that often fly under the radar of visitors and locals alike.... Jane Garmey discusses the numerous Big Apple gardens in her new book City Green: Public Gardens of New York. - Architectural Digest ...a must have for garden aficionados and lovers of all things Manhattan. - Array With this book in hand, even the most ardent naturalist can brave New York City in fine form. - Flower magazine