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.
Multimedia
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
- 1
- 2
