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Garden Unveiled

The New York Botanical Garden’s
2009 & 2010 Seasonal Walk

The New York Botanical Garden’s Seasonal Walk is a broad garden path running between two wide borders adjacent to the glorious glass-domed Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Measuring 184 feet long by 10 feet wide and 86 feet long by six feet wide for a total of 2,356 square feet, the borders are dramatic, colorful, Victorian-style formal plantings that the Botanical Garden redesigns each year, and refreshes seasonally, as a treat to its visitors. The garden path is famous with New Yorkers as a favorite for leisurely strolls and a preferred site for amateur and professional photographers.

For 2009, and now 2010, the Garden unveils a very different planting at its Seasonal Walk

The New York Botanical Garden invited two international garden design superstars, Piet Oudolf of Hummelo, NL and Jacqueline van der Kloet of Weesp, NL, to create a custom four-season garden installation to delight New Yorkers throughout the year of 2009. Both designers are known for sophisticated plant mixes, an artist’s eye for form and color, and complex naturalized plantings that evolve over the seasons.

The Garden has been so pleased with the result that they will keep the installation going and extra year, through 2010.

Oudolf is famed for his artful uses of perennials

His “new wave planting style” in which naturalistic combinations of native plants, perennials, grasses, bulbs and other plant material are used to create harmonious landscapes that evolve over the seasons as do landscapes in nature.

The artistry of Oudolf’s new wave style is seen, in particular, as the seasons progress through summer and fall into winter. Oudolf’s designs play off plant selections that look magnificent in their summer prime and also in their winter senescence when seedpods, berries or dried stems and grasses may continue to provide shape, color and interest.

van der Kloet’s designs
have won international acclaim

Her sophisticated designs feature inspired, often impish, mixes of perennials and flower bulbs with blooming shrubs and trees. Her gardens surprise and delight, initially, and continue to charm as the seasons progress. Like Oudolf, her designs are naturalistic and evolving, but her work is distinguished by a very different touch. Van der Kloet’s gardens have a relaxed random feel that belies the artistry behind her plant placement. Her preferred color palettes are soft yet riveting, her signature look is stylish and eclectic.

Only twice before have the two Dutch designers put their skills together on projects

Both were in the US: in 2006 at Manhattan’s Battery Park and in 2007 at The Lurie Garden of Millennium Park in Chicago. The New York Botanical Garden’s Seasonal Walk is the first garden anywhere that the duo has designed together from scratch. Their Seasonal Walk design was planted in New York in the fall of 2008 by the Botanical Garden’s Horticulture team, joined by the designers in November.

In 2009 & 2010, an evolving seasonal design

With a highly naturalistic design concept that celebrates seasonality, the Oudolf-van der Kloet Seasonal Walk is designed to spill forth an evolving continuum of flowers and foliage over 24 months. Included in the perennial plantings are many native plants as well as Oudolf’s own introductions: coneflowers (Echinacea ‘Fatal Attraction’, ‘Green Jewel’, ‘Vintage Wine’, and ‘Virgin’), avens (Geum ‘Flames of Passion’), and meadow sage (Salvia ‘Eveline’). From winter to spring, to summer, then fall, and winter again, the exciting new garden design presents bold takes on the changing seasons via an ever-changing palette of plant colors, sizes, profiles and textures, while treasuring the varying natural life cycles of plants as they emerge, mature and die-back in their individual times and styles.

Perennials and ornamental grasses anchor the borders

Spring- and summer-flowering bulb act as highlights, accents and harbingers of the color to come. In spring, well before perennials come into leaf to provide summer’s lush green background, a rush of spring-blooming bulbs open the garden’s new season. The rich mix includes tulip (Tulipa), daffodil (Narcissus), grape hyacinth (Muscari), crocus (Crocus) and many other singular spring-flowering bulbs. As the spring bulbs diminish, the perennials pick up momentum. Sneezeweed (Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’), garden phlox (Phlox paniculata ‘Blue Evening’), Japanese anemone (Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’) and great masterwort (Astrantia major ‘Claret’) join ornamental grasses such as prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis) and moor grass (Molinia caerulea ssp.caerulea ‘Dauerstrahl’) to provide a lush display all summer and well into the autumn.

The contribution of bulb flowers doesn’t end in spring

One of the key elements of the design is how the perennials, ornamental grasses and bulb flowers are combined to complement one another through the seasons, in both color and shape. In spring, elegant tulips dance and sway like ballerinas above the emerging green. Later, airy perennial grasses take the edge off of the otherwise rather loud dahlias, while graceful lilies and crocosmia are perfect partners for bugbane (Actea simplex ‘Brunette’) and Chinese astilbe (Astilbe chinensis ‘Vision in Pink’).

The color scheme evolves constantly.

Whites, creams, pinks, lilacs, pale blues and the occasional splash of purple-red herald spring, followed by a symphony of lilacs and purples from the various allium varieties. As summer unfolds, begonia and crocosmia riff with dashes of orange, while lilies add soft yellow tones, and dahlias trill in a wide range of colors. The borders will include astonishing new decorative dahlia varieties that exhibit a range of breathtaking bold shades that perfectly complement the tender hues of the basic perennial plants.

In autumn

The color scheme is muted with the pale pinks and dark reds of nerine, the chocolate browns of Cosmos atrosanguineus. The rich pink flowers of Colchicum 'Rosy Dawn' appear like gems against the backdrop of the slowly changing colors of perennial stonecrop (Sedum ‘Matrona’, ‘Sunkissed’, and ‘Xenox’), sea holly (Eryngium bourgatii) and coneflowers, caught in a mist of transparent grasses.

The Seasonal Walk project is a cooperation between The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, NYC and Holland’s International Flower Bulb Center in Hillegom, NL.