When asking people what comes to mind first when they think of New York City, they usually don’t say plants or gardens. Responses often include the Statue of Liberty, Broadway shows, Times Square, pizza or delis. But nestled near the northeast corner of Central Park – at Fifth Avenue and East 105th Street, and through the wrought iron Vanderbilt Gate – is the Conservatory Garden, the only formal garden in Central Park and a place where many New Yorkers go to unwind. For free.

“I study for exams here, think about stuff and bring dates here,” said Daniel Adams, a first-year medical student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, while relaxing on a bench in the garden.

Thousands of tulips in the north garden at Central Park's Conservatory Garden. (Photo by Brent Ardaugh/CNS)

Linh Tchang, a post-baccalaureate psychology student at Columbia University, also uses the garden as a retreat from her usual routine. “It’s nice and quiet,” she said. “And when the flowers are in bloom, it’s gorgeous, beautiful and serene.”

New York City is not the only urban center where gardens thrive. The Conservatory of Flowers at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco connects visitors with plant life by allowing them to get up-close to rare, tropical flowers.

Also, the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park, which was completed in June 2004, features hundreds of types of perennials and bulbs, shrubs, trees and grasses. The five-acre oasis provides visitors with year-round access to nature while improving the city’s landscape.

Hundreds of other formal gardens are also dispersed throughout the country.

“When things are beautiful, people feel their city cares about them,” said Lynden Miller, the director of the Conservatory Garden, who currently teaches courses on successful public space and public gardens at New York University and Columbia University. “It changes how people see public space.”

In the Conservatory Garden’s French-style north garden, there are currently 20,000 tulips. These tulips are expected to be in full bloom by the end of April, when they will provide visitors with an eyeful of garden glamour and reassurance that warm weather is on its way.

Diane Schaub, the curator of the Conservatory Garden, decides what color tulips will go where. It’s a carefully choreographed process, she said. And every year the display is different.

Soft purple, pink and white tulips are commonly used in the north garden to prevent color clashes with the light pink crabapple trees, which form a backdrop to the garden and also bloom toward the end of April.

Schaub, a former film and sound editor, came to work at the garden in 1994 after completing her studies at the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture. Now in her late 50s, Schaub has been a full-fledged gardener for nearly two decades, but she still draws upon her editing experience when devising garden displays.

“Film is a visual medium, gardening is a visual medium,” she explained. “You edit a garden as careful as you edit a movie. You’re always looking at how things look together.”

In the summer, after choosing a layout, Schaub orders the tulip bulbs. They come from the Netherlands and cost about $9,000. Then, right before Thanksgiving, when the weather in New York City is both cold and unforgiving, the planting begins.

The garden’s five full-time staff and 25 volunteers plant each bulb by hand – about five inches deep in the soil. But their good deeds do not go unrewarded. Around 11 a.m. on the day of the planting, Schaub invites the staff and volunteers into the office for her homemade apple pie.

But after the break, it’s back to planting.

The team gets about half the bulbs planted in three to four hours, and a few days later, the planting is complete.

The bulbs survive winter by dodging the frost, and when April approaches, they awaken, giving Central Park an additional splash of color.

“We’re trying to set up an attractive picture for people,” said Paul Sierra, the assistant curator at the Conservatory Garden, who helped plant the tulips and is beginning his 11th spring working at the garden. “The picture’s in bloom daily.”

As soon as the tulips are spent, a “tulip toss” takes place, where community garden groups and volunteers dig up the flowers and take them to other gardens. But the garden doesn’t stay bare for long. Afterward, 2,500 Korean chrysanthemums take the tulips’ places – just in time for fall.

“The north garden is a two-season extravaganza,” Schaub said.

Although the Conservatory Garden has emerged as a major city attraction, it wasn’t always that way.

In 1982, after years of neglect because of a lack of city funding, the six-acre garden – which is seated on the land of a former greenhouse, and near the projects of East Harlem – had become overgrown, crime ridden and infested with graffiti and litter.

Elizabeth Rogers, the administrator of Central Park at the time, had asked the now world-famous public garden designer Lynden Miller for help in its restoration. In the course of her career, Miller has designed gardens at the New York Botanical Garden, Bryant Park, Columbia University and the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

“I told her ‘you’re crazy, but I’ll fix it up,’” Miller said in an interview. Miller knew the undertaking would be challenging.

Rogers had formed a public-private partnership, the Central Park Conservancy, which allowed Central Park to receive $500 million from private donors and $150 million from the city. And in 1987, Miller had finished restoring the garden and raised a $1.5 million endowment for its continued care.

The garden now has three distinct gardens within – the English, Italian and French gardens.

But the garden still has one mystery – the colors of this year’s tulip display in the north garden, which according to Schaub, shall remain a surprise.

Email: bma2124@columbia.edu