Description

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New York may be most easily recognized by its trademark skyscrapers and brick tenement buildings, but the truth is that the city is actually teeming with luxurious roof gardens and private courtyard oases. Creative gardeners and architects have risen to meet the unique challenges of the urban landscape, designing spaces that celebrate the city while providing a restful escape.

New York City Gardens presents New York’s evolving tradition of garden culture through images and discussions of thirty of its most outstanding gardens, from world-famous botanical gardens to richly re-cultivated public urban spaces, luxurious penthouse terraces, and innovative art gardens without soil or plants. Many of the gardens are set against vistas of the quintessential New York—Central Park, the Empire State Building, skyscrapers of Midtown, and the sensational skyline of Lower Manhattan. Other gardens reveal surprising and exotic intimate retreats from the bustle of the city. While most were designed by noted landscape architects, including Dan Kiley, Hideo Sasaki, Ken Smith, and Halsted Wells, many others were created over decades by talented homeowners themselves.

As more and more city dwellers in New York and beyond look to cultivate their own kitchen and container gardens and individual outdoor sanctuaries, this book provides hundreds of inspiring images as well as historical background and insight into the practical and imaginative solutions of city garden designers.

About the Author

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Veronika Hofer is an author on the subjects of garden culture and art history. She has directed programs for European television, including films on the gardens of Marrakech, Delhi, and New York. Betsy Pinover Schiffstudied at the International Center of Photography and the School of Visual Arts in New York before making her name as a specialist in photography of landscape architecture and gardens. She lives in New York City.

Veronika Hofer is an author on the subjects of garden culture and art history. She has directed programs for European television, including films on the gardens of Marrakech, Delhi, and New York. Betsy Pinover Schiffstudied at the International Center of Photography and the School of Visual Arts in New York before making her name as a specialist in photography of landscape architecture and gardens. She lives in New York City.

Praise For…

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"In New York City Gardens,Veronika Hofer and Betsy Pinover Schiff offer up a visually inviting respite from the city of steel, glass, concrete and asphalt. They celebrate the city’s luxuriant public and private spaces — including one real estate company’s office terrace, which required 98 tons of planters, dirt, trees and material delivered over six months. . . . New York City Gardens is an ambrosial paean to public and private spaces."
— Sam Roberts

“Eclectic mix of traditional backyards with chic roof gardens and public parks.”

— Gardens Illustrated

“This book had me at hello, with the opening garden on a rooftop terrace overlooking Central Park. Other little wonders featured have views overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Manhattan skyline, or are so extraordinary that you could never guess from the pictures that they were even in a city. . . . Very cool and unexpectedly marvelous.”

— English Garden