New York Review of Books Review

Soon after i moved to Manhattan in the late 1970s, an old friend taught me to roller-skate. It feels like a lifetime ago now. We would go dancing at clubs - those disco nights - and then, as a new day dawned, lace up our boots and roll into Central Park. We had the place to ourselves, though getting any speed was tricky since the roads were pocked and potted. On all sides, the lawns were filthy and tattered. But as I looped through it, I fell in love with Central Park. Luckily, at about the same time another woman felt the same way. SAVING CENTRAL PARK: A History and a Memoir (Knopf, $30) is Elizabeth Barlow Rogers's inspiring story of how, in the face of considerable resistance, she created a partnership to privately augment the funding and management of the park. Rogers attended the Yale School of Architecture's city planning program while her husband was at law school. By the time they moved to New York, she had a daughter. But Rogers remembers how deeply resonant were the words she read in Betty Friedan's 1963 volume, "The Feminine Mystique": "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home." Rogers's inadvertent municipal revolution proceeded in quiet stages. She joined a group called the Central Park Task Force and in 1976 created what turned out to be a clever marketing campaign with a magazine article called "32 Ways Your Time and Money Can Rescue Central Park." In one week, she raised $25,000, along with many volunteers. This led to her formation of the Central Park Conservancy, which, with a handshake from Mayor Koch, eventually became an auxiliary of the city government. New Yorkers may not appreciate how fragile a hold this public space has always had. Rogers swiftly reprises its history, beginning with the landscape firm of Olmsted and Vaux turning "a ragged 843-acre wasteland" into an area for scenic recreation. By 1872,10 million visitors had ridden carriages along the drives, strolled the Mall, hiked the Ramble and boated and skated on the park's lakes and ponds. "Think, then, of the Olmstedian experience of Central Park as one of articulated movement," Rogers writes - exactly as it felt to this skater. Boss Tweed inflicted the first era of depredation on the romantic grounds, destroying thousands of trees as a prelude to creating grandiose public works. As time passed, the park's commissioners saw increasing opportunities for development. By the early 1900s, as sheep were grazing on Sheep Meadow, the park was becoming a recreational arena, dotted with playing fields and tennis courts. But the person who had the greatest impact was Robert Moses. On becoming parks commissioner in 1934, he ordered the paving of paths with asphalt, lined the shores of ponds and lakes with riprap embankments, reordered portions of the drives to accommodate cars and parking lots, built a new zoo and added playgrounds and skating rinks. Moses' iron-fisted rule ended in 1960. After that, the park took a pounding. Rock concerts, be-ins, happenings, antiwar demonstrations, kite-flying contests and circus parades filled the meadows, which became dust bowls. A thriving drug trade took hold. By the time Rogers retired in 1995, the Conservancy had put more than $100 million of private money into the park; today, she says, the figure has grown to $1 billion. All that money went into the refurbishment of hardscapes and the restoration of gardens, as well as planting and pruning. Rogers doesn't address the controversy that eventually attended that fund-raising, as other parks in poorer neighborhoods remained neglected. Slowly but, we hope, surely, that disparity is being addressed. The celebratory CITY GREEN: Public Gardens of New York (Monaceiii, $50), by Jane Garmey, with romantic photographs by Mick Hales, is an evocative accompaniment to Rogers's memoir. Of course, it honors Central Park's gardens, but it pays attention to plenty of other jewels as well, including the masterfully minimalist Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park at the tip of Roosevelt Island, the blowzy Native Plant Garden at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and Midtown's timelessly elegant and beloved Paley Park. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi's studio and garden in Queens deserves to be counted among America's finest intimate museums. And an authentic classical Chinese garden on Staten Island was a revelation to me; I'm on the next ferry. For some women, the love of a good garden inspires civic engagement. For others, a garden is a deeply personal affair. The English novelist Penelope Lively's memoir, life in the garden (Viking, $25), is really about her decades of green thoughts. As you might expect from a writer of her charms, it's appealingly shambolic and literary. This is a book about the "charisma" of gardens. Now 85, Lively muses about old age, which "creeps up on you and has to be faced down." She has tilled and planted small urban plots and larger country acres, but now her gardening must accommodate her bad back. Thankfully, that doesn't stop her from reaching for the bookshelves. What a pleasure to keep company with the likes of T. S. Eliot, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Willa Cather, Tom Stoppard and the many other writers who stroll through these pages. Like them, Lively has both favorites and vexations. She casts a trenchant eye on the way garden centers dictate our tastes, deplores the "possibly sinister intent" of ivy and avoids the writers, like P. G. Wodehouse, whose garden descriptions she considers "suspect." On the other hand, Lively approves of Virginia Woolf, who noted, after a day of weeding: "This is happiness." Lively muses on "the question of time, order - and perception." To her, the greatest gift a garden gives is "that enriching lift out of the restrictions of now, and today." She is willing to annoy those without green thumbs by flat-out declaring that gardeners, because of their ability to pay close attention to mundane miracles, are "more perceptive" people. I'll raise my trowel to that! Several lifetimes ago - in 1622, to be precise - Cassiano dal Pozzo, one of Italy's most prolific patrons of the arts and sciences, commissioned a set of bird drawings for his Paper Museum. These have now been paired with a catalog of scientific observations by Giovanni Pietro Olina, written during the same period, called the "Uccelliera" ("Aviary"). PASTA FOR NIGHTINGALES: A 17th-Century Handbook of Bird-Care and Folklore (Yale University, $22.50) must be the season's most endearingly eccentric offering. In her graceful introduction, Helen Macdonald, author of "H Is for Hawk," explains that "the role of birds in 17th-century Italy can feel bewildering to us"; they were appreciated not just as "delightful songsters" but as "culinary delicacies, and useful human medicine." In this handsome volume, we learn that an enclosure for the sensitive ortolan must be well plastered to keep out moles and should not afford a view of greenery lest the bird become melancholy. We are told that the eggs and brains of the Italian sparrow are useful for "husbands who are cold and have little vigor." Ant eggs are an effective medicine, should your nightingale languish. And yes: There's a recipe for grains of pasta to feed your captive singer. Avoid giving it salted things, and it will come with "charm and graces to your finger." No amount of pasta will help the crashing songbird popDOMINIQUE ulations today; they need another sort of kind attention. For that matter, the butterflies are suffering too. Thoughts of rescue are on many minds. The North American Butterfly Association offers a lavish guide to remedying their plight in BUTTERFLY GARDENING (Princeton University, paper, $29.95), by Jane Hurwitz. It's helpfully organized by region, and so straightforward and reasonable that there should soon be many more nectar banquets for these important pollinators. Too many of us forget that the caterpillar stage is critical: Using pesticides early in the season means no butterflies later. But you'll be relieved to know that you don't have to do a thing for the glorious-looking Mourning Cloak butterflies: They're drawn to tree sap, rotting fruit and animal dung. While we're celebrating winged beauty, why is it that the first association many of us have with moths is... holes in our sweaters? Moths deserve awe. The reliable Peterson Institute has just produced a field guide to moths of SOUTHEASTERN NORTH AMERICA (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $29). This region boasts an impressive array of sphinx moths and scoopwings. The list of names alone is thrilling: moss-eaters, ghost moths, fairy moths; flannel and lichen moths and slug moths, oh my! The pleasure of meeting the incandescently blue-green Luna moth awaits you in these pages; could this have been the model for Tinkerbell? Head out with your flashlight and if you get confused, here are some pointers: The antennas of a butterfly are clubbed at the tip; those of a moth are feathery or threadlike. A recipe for sugar bait is provided for their delectation, and yours. Plant the proper trees and shrubs to nurture your local bees, butterflies, moths and birds with help from essential NATIVE TREES AND SHRUBS FOR THE EASTERN UNITED STATES: The Guide to Creating a Sustainable Landscape (Imagine, $35), by Tony Dove, who has managed public gardens on the East Coast for 50 years, and Ginger Woolridge, a Marylandbased garden designer. This is an authoritative catalog, organized by a range of categories: those that have attractive bark or are evergreen, those that have showy flowers or are wind, salt or drought tolerant. Lucky Southerners and Westerners can dive into Jason Dewees's designing with palms (Timber, $50). Dewees, who runs the Palm Broker website out of San Francisco, is a leading authority on these enviably bold, dramatic plants. Informative photographs by Caitlin Atkinson feature them in situ, allowing you to admire the key thatch palms that grace a Florida bromeliad garden and the palmettos within a hedge in Charleston, S.C. Almost half the book is devoted to an inventory of individual species. Eat your heart out, Bostonians; this isn't love for a cold climate. DESERT GARDENS OF STEVE MARTINO (Monacelli, $50), by Caren Yglesias, proves that no one uses palm trees - and other desert plants - more fluently. Part of Martino's trick is setting plants that have few flowers but fabulous shapes against geometric slabs of deeply colored walls. The crimson hues in a Phoenix garden must be as much of a draw for the hummingbirds as the mirrored surface of the water trough. Blue concrete pyramids, magenta poles, yellow awnings and fiberglass panels - these are all elements in Martino's playful, imaginative designs. But although this monograph showcases a mastery of hardscape, specific plants are often left frustratingly unidentified. On the other hand, I can't quibble with gardens that hark back to early-sixth-century Iran - while being entirely modern. A dear friend from New Orleans has just sent me his personal photographic chronicles of the rivers of Scotland and the Scottish glens, along with a reminder that the urge to catalog the world goes back to Homer. Catalogs give an impression of order, which is especially soothing in chaotic times. That must be why I responded so ardently to the BOOK OF SEEDS: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred Species From Around the World (University of Chicago, $55), edited by Paul Smith, formerly head of the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. This volume is handsome and handy. Learn here about achenes like rhubarb seeds, which are dispersed by the wind. Or samaras, like the seeds of the English elm, found in the middle of two transparent green wings. A floriferous catalog makes the heart sing, and nothing says swoon like a blossom called "Gay Paree." Learn about it and many others in PEONY: The Best Varieties for Your Garden (Timber, $27.95), by David Michener, who oversees the largest public collection of historical herbaceous peonies in North America at the Nichols Arboretum in Michigan, and Carol Adelman, a grower of 484 varieties near Salem, Ore. It's a wonderful reminder of the decades of breeding that peonies have inspired. Creating a spectacularly colorful hybrid between herbaceous and tree peonies was, they tell us, the Holy Grail for more than a century. A Japanese grower named Itoh began hand-pollinating flowers to attempt a cross, with no success until, in 1948, after 2,000 attempts, six seedlings showed vigor. Cruelly, he died before those sprouts flowered. You could write an opera for this diva of flowers. What to do with those masses of peonies - or the armloads of flowers you couldn't resist at the farmer's market? MARTHA'S FLOWERS: A Practical Guide to Growing, Gathering, and Enjoying (Clarkson Potter, $45) has many suggestions. It's the labor of love of Martha Stewart and Kevin Sharkey, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who went to work at Martha Stewart Living in the mid-1990s. Stewart credits him with being "the cutter and arranger" while she (and her gardeners) are the growers - at her homes in Maine, East Hampton and Westchester County. As you would expect, Sharkey sets the most stylish of standards. Never mind the lilacs and tulips. The vases are breathtaking. Sharkey has a wonderful eye for quirky, gorgeous combinations of color and texture. The bouquets of suggestions, advice and tips offered throughout are especially engaging, as are Stewart's reminiscences about the gardens of her childhood. In another lifetime, if I'm not to be found feeding pasta to nightingales, perhaps I could be chugging through a linden alléé pulling a wagonload of lilacs. Hammer in hand to crush the stems, of course. But whatever lifetime we happen to find ourselves in, let's take to heart the advice of Philip Larkin. In her garden memoir, Penelope Lively reminds us of his marvelous poem about the accidental killing of a hedgehog: "We should be more careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time." BROWNING, formerly the editor of House & Garden, is the founder and director of Moms Clean Air Force. She works at the Environmental Defense Fund.