Conservatory Garden

Central Park is usually known for its wide lawns, winding trails, and beautiful lakes. Few people know that the northeast corner of the park is home to six-acres of formal, European-style gardens. The Conservatory Gardens, named for the glass conservatory that was originally built on the site in 1899, are today a set of three immaculately kept gardens. The main gates on 5th Avenue open into the central Italian-style garden. A large, symmetrical parterre is framed at the far end by a wisteria-covered pergola and a simple fountain. The French garden to the north consists of rings of flowerbeds and a paved path surrounding a decorative fountain. The southern garden, designed in the English style, is currently closed for renovations. The gardens, which opened in 1937, were mostly neglected for decades, before the first major restoration took place in the 1980s. They are once again undergoing restoration, and soon the gardens will be accessible to all, and more beautiful than ever.

US Embassy in London

The US Embassy building in London is a remarkable landmark, with a design that combines utility, security, and sustainability with a striking appearance, inside and out. Opened in 2017, the building is relatively new. The design, by Philadelphia-based architecture firm Kieran Timberlake, is meant to evoke some of the foundational ideals of American government – transparency, openness, and equality. The building’s simple cube shape maximizes useable space in a high-traffic embassy, and the façade made of transparent, high-performance plastic catches the sunlight in an appealing and useful way, directing the natural light throughout the interior of the building. The outside of the building also boasts a landscaped pond that serves double duty as an attractive aesthetic feature and a rainwater retention system, reducing strain on the municipal water system and pollution of the nearby Thames River by repurposing collected water for irrigation and mechanical systems. The inside of the building is equally well designed, featuring indoor gardens and countless works of art, including an enormous mural created with the words in the US Constitution.

The Harlem Meer

Central Park, built in the mid-1800s, was the first landscaped public park in the United States. Its designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, were ambitious, aiming to create a space in the middle of New York City where residents could experience a wide variety of landscapes all in one place. The park successfully combines landscaped gardens, wild wooded areas, pastoral fields, and more. The designers also incorporated several bodies of water – ponds, lakes, and streams – into their plans. In the northeast corner of the park, the Harlem Meer is one such manmade lake. The Meer, Dutch for “lake,” is today a haven for wildlife like fish, turtles, and waterfowl, as well as a popular destination for the neighboring community in Harlem.

Brier Patch by Hugh Hayden

An unsettling assembly of school desks with branches growing from the surfaces is an unexpected sight in Madison Square Park. The installation by artist Hugh Hayden evokes in turn nostalgia, optimism, and foreboding. The desks, organized in neat rows like in a classroom, are disrupted by the twisting mass of branches that emerge from the seats of the chairs and the tops of the desks. Evocative of folklore stories like Br’er Rabbit and Sleeping Beauty, the canopy that forms could offer a safe place to hide, or prove to be dangerously prickly.