Public Garden Savior

Lynden Miller: The vigilante who saved New York’s public parks

Having fallen into disrepair because of budget cuts in NYC’s Parks Department, Central Park’s formal six-acre Conservatory Garden was bring back to life in the mid-1980s by Lynden Miller. Photo by: Sara Cedar Miller

Lynden Miller left her mark on the perennial borders at the New York Botanical Garden. Photo by: John Peden/NYC.

Miller’s 9/11 “Daffodil Project” beautifies more 1,000 city parks, some of which hadn’t seen a flower in years. Photo by: Joe De Sciose

Lynden Miller. Photo by: Joe De Scoise

To comprehend Lynden Miller’s impact on New York City, just visit one of the many public gardens she has restored-from the Conservatory Garden at the northern end of Central Park at 105th Street and 5th Avenue, to Bryant Park behind the great Carrere & Hastings-designed New York Public Library, to Madison Square Park and Wagner Park in Battery Park City, to reclaiming and enhancing the former working waterfront of Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the grandiose blooms of ‘Lord Baltimore’ hibiscus beckon from a block away. Witnessing the fantastical, horticultural exuberance that Miller has brought back to much of New York over the past 25 years, it is hard to imagine what those parks were reduced to before she began her tireless restoration campaign. In most instances, flowers, shrubs and small trees had all but disappeared, leaving behind not much more than trash-strewn lawns and a declining canopy of trees.

Today, these gardens embrace a painterly palette of plantings that invite people back into public spaces-and prove that the rehabilitation of urban parks helps to revive neighborhoods, encourage tourism, radically reduce crime, and just as radically increase real-estate values. It’s clear: revitalizing our nation’s parks is good for business and good for people. Miller’s approach has been infectious, setting off public park revitalization from Chicago’s Michigan Avenue to San Francisco’s Union Square.

Miller has always loved gardens and gardened seriously at home, but she wasn’t always a professional. Trained as a painter and a student of horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, for years she regularly walked Central Park with her friend Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. Then one day in 1982 Rogers, the founder of the Central Park Conservancy, asked her to spearhead the revitalization of the Conservatory Garden, hoping she would bring her talent as a painter to the landscape. Following the lead of the pioneering landscape architect Betty Sprout, who provided the original plantings for the six-acre garden in the 1930s, Miller created plantings that provide the structure for the garden rooms, that frame and manipulate views, and that, through their beauty, “enhance city life,” as Miller likes to say.

Miller’s landscapes bring back memories of Olde New York captured in the Impressionist paintings of Childe Hassam and Ernest Lawson. As with these artists who found inspiration in New York City’s picturesque green spaces, such as Union Square and Madison Square Park, Miller has taught us to see these spaces anew, in part by reinterpreting the late nineteenth-century practice of seasonal display planting, often referred to as “bedding out.” Likewise, in her 2002 project at The New York Botanical Garden, where she redesigned the perennial borders, and the 260-foot-long Ladies Border along the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, she both captured the planting ideals of the Country Place Era (1890-1940) and pushed the horticultural boundaries by introducing magnolia, camellia, nandina, and mahonia.

For all the beauty of her garden plantings, there is always a sociopolitical intent behind Miller’s work, which is perhaps most obvious in “The Daffodil Project,” which she spearheaded with the Dutch bulb grower Hans van Waardenburg. On September 12, 2001, Miller received a fax from him expressing his sympathy for New York City and a wish to help. Working with the Parks Department beginning in the fall of 2001, thousands of volunteers have planted the nearly 5 million daffodils that Van Waardenburg has donated to the city since that time, and which now bloom in honor of those who died on 9/11 and beautify some 1,000 locations around the city.

Lynden Miller should be recognized as the tastemaker for the next generation, which views our urban landscapes and open spaces as its canvas. For more information on Lynden Miller see publicgardendesign.com