Miller

If you start at the Battery and walk along the Hudson, you pass through a series of terrific gardens. After the Oudolf garden at the tip of the Battery is Wagner Park, designed by Laurie Olin. A tiered lawn lies between a pavilion and the river. It’s an urban beach: unpretentious and scaled to the grandeur of the harbor view.

At either side of the pavilion are two formal flower gardens that were planted by Lynden Miller. These gardens are a good example of the current official style of public flower gardens in New York. This idiom is represented by Miller’s own work at the Conservancy Gardens in Central Park, Columbia, and the New York Botanic Garden, and it the work of others, as in Bryant Park.

http://www.publicgardendesign.com/projects/index.htm

These gardens are formal; geometric beds and sheared shrubs form compartments containing bright vignettes. Flowering shrubs and large perennials are massed at the back of the beds and a huge variety of tender annuals, bulbs, dwarf evergreens, and foliage plants are brought together to deliver maximum color through the warm months. Every corner is treated as if it were an arrangement of cut flowers, and the display is kept going for months on end.

Miller’s palette is as varied as Odoulf’s, but entirely different. Her plants are mostly tender exotics with colored leaves and vivid flowers, and her compositions rely on bold contrast. There are great things here (like Cuphea ‘David Verity’, pictured) that really thrive in New York’s summer. It’s a sophisticated gloss on the bright, old fashioned bedding flowers - petunias, marigolds, begonias.

I criticized the Oudolf garden for patchy over-assortment. His taste runs to “natural” looking meadow and prairie plants, informally composed. This creates an expectation of unified effect. Separating the plants into patches contradicts the main idea.

Miller’s plantings are even more assorted, but it doesn’t really come off as a fault. Her plants are “artificial” and the layout is formal, so different expectations prevail. The eye moves from one vivid arrangement to the next, seeking novelty, variety and diversion. It’s like walking down a city street and beholding one character after another.

All this is very much in the spirit of the tidied New York of recent years. Nice and safe, intensely maintained, ladylike.

Oudolf

A few weeks ago, with a storm approaching, I went down to the Battery to see Piet Oudolf’s Garden of Remembrance. This kind of perennial planting, which emphasizes texture and motion rather than flower color, is spectacular in September.

The variety of plants is wonderful. This is a gardens where I’d appreciate the information gained from labeling plants more than I’d resent the eyesore of all the tags. Fortunately, the Battery Conservancy website publishes a list:

http://www.thebattery.org/gardens/gorplantlist.php

Among the standouts: Calamintha nepeta nepeta, Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’, Agastache rupestris and A. ‘Blue Fortune’, Panicum ‘Shenandoah’, Amsonia hubrechtii, and Persicaria ‘Firetail’.

This garden hugs the shore of the battery between Castle Clinton and the water. Irregular beds are separated by gravel paths that wind through a grove of plane trees. At water’s edge, exposed to the sun and wind, is a paved promenade. Here concentric rows of raised beds and paths make a more formal edge to the garden.

The odd thing about this garden is that the planting is innovative, but the layout is old-fashioned. (I could believe that the plan is a nineteenth century relic of the ‘gardenesque’ school. The paths meander without destination and ‘specimen’ plants seem chosen to show off the breadth of the collection.)

The plane trees and gravel paths hang together as a coherent expression, but the herbaceous layer is over-assorted. Oudolf’s planting palette suggests meadows and prairies, wild places where plants mingle and mix in a continuous carpet. In this garden the varieties are separated and planted in mid-sized drifts and clumps. To me the patchwork effect is disconcertingly suburban.

That said, this still a good place to see the current thinking about perennials. But I’d like to see an edited selection of these plants, composed with greater deliberation.

Oudolf has the commission for planting much of the Highline.