JOIN USFor five years now, I have been
tending a plot – cultivating hostas, lillies and astilbes, gently trying to persuade a hydrangea bush not to depart this earth – in the Lotus Garden, a community garden on West 97th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue.
The Lotus Garden is one of the most lush and tranquil spots in New York, but if you’ve never heard of it, you are far from alone. While a sign on an iron gate plainly marks the entrance, all that is visible through the bars is a flight of concrete stairs leading to the roof of a parking garage.
But should you be inclined to mount those steps – an opportunity the public has – you would find a sixth of an acre supporting mature trees, shrubs and serpentine paths curving around clumps of fragrant plantings maintained by 30 gardeners of various ages and experience levels.
There are also vines, bits of statuary, conversational seating clusters, a quaintly decomposing toolshed and a pair of goldfish ponds that gave the garden its name. It appears that a man from Manchuria who had been growing lotuses in tubs in his New York living room showed up one day around the time the garden was being
installed three decades ago and asked if he could park them in the new ponds while the weather was warm.
Yes, three decades: that’s how long it has sat on its rooftop, hemmed in by buildings, like a miniature High Line without tourist swarms. And then there is the extraordinary way it came to be.
As recounted by Jeffrey Kindley, a Lotus gardener who shares a plot with his wife, Louise, and is compiling the garden’s
history to commemorate its thirtieth
anniversary. At that time, Broadway
between West 96th and West 97th Streets was a study in blight, having been stripped of a pair of historic theatres, the Riverside and the Riviera. The buildings had
survived the death of vaudeville, but not the city’s recent financial crisis.
Mark Greenwald, an architect with the Department of City Planning and a rooftop gardener at his West 97th Street home, joined members of his block association in persuading Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the bank that owned the vacant land, to
allow the group to clear it of rubble and lay down soil around the perimeter. Within a few years, the lot, a full acre, was accommodating 125 gardeners working 75 plots, Mark told Jeffrey. He noted that even the neighbourhood derelicts were supportive. “One day somebody jumped the fence and stole a tomato,” he said. “One of the guys on the corner hit him over the head with a wine bottle.”
Among the gardeners was a songwriter and comedy writer named Carrie Maher. Mark recently told me how he passed by the vacant lot on his way to the subway each morning and struck up an acquaintance with Carrie through the chain-link fence. They became comrades in trowels, who eventually were married at the nearby Cathedral of St John the Divine, but I’m getting ahead of the story. Carrie, on top of her other interests, was a community garden activist with connections to the city’s various greening groups. Mark knew his way around urban space and bureaucracies.
In November 1984, Carrie and Mark
recruited local volunteers to lay out the
Lotus Garden. In the centre, they planted a dwarf peach tree that grew 12 feet high and 20 feet wide, and within a few years was producing bushels of fruit.
When news of the garden spread, the couple was contacted by the horticulturalist at Rockefeller Center, who offered three Amelanchier canadensis, or serviceberry trees, that were failing to thrive on the
centre’s roof terrace and waited to be picked up from a Midtown garage under cover of darkness. Each tree weighed 500 pounds, Mark estimated, and required
creative manoeuvring to haul up the stairs.
The couple assembled the first group of gardeners, whose numbers were so sparse that each worked multiple plots. They
started an annual Halloween party that continues to this day, and introduced the practice of distributing keys for a nominal fee so that the public could enjoy the garden throughout the week.
Mark told Jeffrey, the Lotus historian, that he and Carrie wanted to prevent the bickering that had fouled relationships
in other community gardens, so they ran the Lotus Garden “like a benevolent
dictatorship.”
After 11 years, the couple moved to
Connecticut and opened a landscape
design firm. They turned over leadership of the Lotus Garden to Mary Sherman
Parsons, who was known for her severity. (Among other things, she was said to be strictly opposed to moving plants around.) “We were more like Omar Bradley, she was more like George Patton,” Mark said.
After Mary’s death and a year of shared leadership, Kenneth Karpel, a consulting architect, became president. A few years later, he handed the reins to Pamela Mason Wagner, an extroverted Emmy-winning documentary film director and producer, and Judith Vowles, an introspective
European literature scholar and author, who bring complementary gifts to their coalition government. Kenneth continues to spearhead projects like rebuilding the toolshed and constructing new composting bins. When one gardener moved out of state, stripping her plot of plants, even those she had inherited from previous
custodians, he conducted a sage-burning ceremony to clear the garden of all traces of malevolence.
The garden has been tended by a few world-class horticulturists, like Fred Rosenstiel, whom Mark remembered mostly for crushing the ambitions of his associates, swearing that the plants they proposed to embed would never live. But you are more likely to discover that your fellow gardener began as a sub-amateur who has killed countless perennials along the path to knowledge.
“Because I’m English, people think I must be good at gardening,” Judith, the garden’s co-president and treasurer, said with a strain of her native accent popping out like a crocus in frost. She added that her chief bugbears were plants like red salvia that grew unexpectedly large and made a quantity of killing shade. As she spoke, I gazed up at her towering lemon-coloured roses and thought that anything that
perished in their perfumed shadow would be lucky.