Conservatory Garden

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The Vanderbilt Gate leads to the formal central section.
The Vanderbilt Gate leads to the formal central section.

The Conservatory Garden is the only formal garden in Central Park, New York City. Comprising six acres, it takes its name from a conservatory that stood on the site from 1898 to 1934.[1] The park's head gardener used the glasshouses to harden hardwood cuttings for the park's plantings. After the conservatory was torn down, the garden was opened to the public in 1937. It is composed of three distinct parts, originally designed by Gilmore D. Clarke, landscape architect for Robert Moses, but skillfully replanted in the 1980s, and is accessible through the Vanderbilt Gate at Fifth Avenue and 105th Street, a quarter mile (400 meters) south of the park's northeast corner.

The Vanderbilt Gate (illustrated above) once gave access to the forecourt of Cornelius Vanderbilt II's chateau designed by George Browne Post, the grandest of the Fifth Avenue mansions of the Gilded Age, at 58th Street and Fifth Avene, sharing the Plaza with the Plaza Hotel. The gates were designed by Post and executed in Paris. Below the steps, the central section of the Conservatory Garden is a symmetrical lawn outlined in clipped yew,[2] with a single fountain jet at the rear. It is flanked by twin allées of crabapples and backed by a wisteria pergola against the steep natural slope. Otherwise there is no flower color: instead, on any fine Saturday in June, it is the scene of photography sessions for colorful wedding parties, for which limousines pull up in rows on Fifth Avenue.[3]

To the left on the south side, is the garden of mixed herbaceous borders in wide concentric bands around The Secret Garden water lily pool, dedicated to the memory of Frances Hodgson Burnett, with sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh, 1936. Some large shrubs, like tree lilac, magnolias, Buddleias and Cornus alba 'elegantissima provide vertical structure and offer light shade to offset the sunny locations, planted by Lynden Miller with a wide range of hardy perennials and decorative grasses, intermixed with annuals planted to seem naturalized. This garden has seasonal features to draw visitors from April through October.

To the right of the central formal plat is a garden also in concentric circles, round the Untermyer Fountain, which was donated by the family of Samuel Untermyer in 1947. The bronze figures, Three Dancing Maidens by Walter Schott (1861-1938), were executed in Germany about 1910 [4] and formed a fountain at Untermyer's estate "Greystone" in Yonkers, New York.

It has two dramatic seasons, a mass display of tulips in the spring and a massed display of Korean chrysanthemums in the fall. Beds of santolina clipped in knotted designs with contrasting bronze-leaved bedding begonias surround the fountain, and four rose arbor gates are planted with reblooming 'Silver Moon' and "Betty Prior" roses.

After the Second World War the garden had become neglected, and by the 1970s a wasteland. It was restored and partially replanted under the direction of horticulturist and urban landscape designer Lynden Miller, to reopen in June 1987. The overgrown, top-heavy crabapples were freed of watershoots and pruned up to a higher scaffold for better form. The high-style mixed planting was the first to bring estate garden style to urban parks, part of the general renewal of Central Park under Elizabeth Barlow Rogers of the Central Park Conservancy.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Many specific facts in this article are drawn from Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, and from www.centralparknyc.org. the Central Park Conservancy website.
  2. ^ Designated "French" or "Italian" equally by journalists.
  3. ^ New York Insider
  4. ^ The Untermyer Fountain

[edit] External links

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