Seventieth Street Garden

While the Fifth Avenue garden is grand and imposing, the Seventieth Street Garden, designed by Russell Page in 1977, is soft and intimate. In the words of its designer, this garden is to be viewed — from the street or through the arched windows of the Reception Hall — like an Impressionist painting. Despite its formal structure of pea gravel paths and boxwood, what Mr. Page called the "bones" of a garden, it is a flowering garden nearly year round. The salient feature of Page's garden is the rectangular pool in the center lawn crowned in summer with blue and white tropical lilies and lotus. Vines of clematis and climbing hydrangea cover the trellis, and wisteria vines soften the hard limestone walls. Page's garden is designed to slow, or stop, a busy New Yorker, to make one pause for a moment — as a respite from the city.

—Galen Lee, Horticulturist and Special Events Designer