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CONVENTIONAL WISDOM holds that high summer is not the best time to visit a garden. Almost all of our best-loved flowering plants, from perennials to trees, bloom between April and early July, and anyone who would venture out of his or her neighborhood to see an annual border on a hot day is surely in the grip of an obsession.
Conventional wisdom, in this case, is wrong. A great garden is not about flowers. It is much more: a landscape of trees and shrubs, architecture, water, rocks, meadow and lawn. Green is the formal gardener's primary color, and the dog days of August are a perfect time to observe the subtleties of his work.
With trees and a running brook, a good gardener can lower the temperature 20 degrees on a hot day. A great one can make a landscape that speaks to the heart as directly as a painting or a novel does.
There are many excellent small public gardens in the New York area, but four are built on a grander scale: the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay and Old Westbury Gardens. To enter any of them is to leave behind the trash and ephemera of everyday life, from gum wrappers to raucous music to Frisbees, for an idealized world. Brooklyn Botanic Garden
There is probably no large plot of land in New York State that is as well tended acre for acre as the 50-acre Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. Though it includes many small gardens within its borders, one can quickly grasp the landscape as a whole. Higher ground to the north holds a formal terrace garden bordered by a ginkgo walk, which affords a view to the south of the cherry esplanade and the rose garden below.
The allee, a long field or avenue bordered by trees, is one of the simplest and most forceful of landscaping techniques. The cherry esplanade consists of two allees of Japanese cherry trees separated by a broad field and flanked on the outer edges by red-leafed maples.
Beyond is a large meadow bisected by a small stream that is informally planted with islands of trees...