Gardens
Autumn in the Garden
Sometime around the first hard frost, we remove the annual flowers in our planters, replacing them with various evergreens, to keep the entrances and plazas welcoming through the winter months. Our cover plant, Chamaecyparis pisifera 'Filifera Aurea Nana,' is one such evergreen, its gold-colored needles combining nicely with various junipers and plantings of Hedera helix vine (this issue's highlight). Boxwood (Buxus) and yew (Taxus) punctuate our perennial borders and other areas through the winter. While boxwood in particular creates frames around seasonal plantings and gives the park a sense of structure year-round, both it and yew serve as the park’s green "bones" in the winter, after the flowers are removed and the deciduous shrubs lose their leaves.
This year we renovated an area on the 42nd Street perimeter near Fifth Avenue by reconfiguring the bluestone to better accommodate tables and chairs. At the same time, we installed new planting beds, whose corners are punctuated with boxwood, leaving room for seasonal flowers like begonias in summer and evergreens like Chamaecyparis and Pieris japonica for the fall planting. Though the changes are subtle, they have proven very effective: we see many more people enjoying that area of the park.
- Maureen Hackett, Director of Horticulture
Autumn Highlight: Hedera helix - English ivy
More commonly known as English ivy, Hedera helix plays several roles in the garden. Tolerant of both sun and shade, virtually pest-free, and hardy in this climate, it is a valuable winter accent in our planters and serves year round as groundcover in large rectangles along the perimeters. There, the large, flat expanses of ivy create drama and contrast with the canopy of the London plane trees overhead and with the surrounding skyscrapers. We also use it on the Bryant Park Grill on the wood and steel trellis work.
Green Matters
While groundcovers and mulch treatments are important components of gardens and landscapes year round, they are especially so in fall and winter. In Bryant Park, we like to mulch our perennial beds in the fall with a finely shredded pine bark, which protects the soil and plants and also gives a neater and smoother appearance. This is particularly useful in areas with large square footage devoted to seasonal plantings or flowers in the spring and summer months. In landscapes where we have planted mixed shrubbery and perennials, an alternative to mulching is underplanting with a permanent groundcover.
We favor something like Vinca minor (periwinkle), which is evergreen and covered with blue flowers in the spring, bringing early color to the garden. As it is also finely textured, it forms an eye-pleasing blanket over what would otherwise be bare soil in winter. Unlike English ivy, periwinkle is not invasive, and it serves much the same function as mulch, protecting the associated soil and shrubbery from erosion and helping to retain moisture.
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Garden Notes
Download a PDF of this season's Garden Notes.