Lessons in a N.Y. garden

An elevated railroad track in the middle of Manhattan doesn’t sound like a good prospect for a beautiful and innovative urban park, but the High Line park is just that. Our cities, including those in the Bay Area, are littered with abandoned industrial structures and spaces, and this garden offers inspiration for reclaiming them with grace and utility. “Gardens of the High Line: Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes” (Timber Press, 2017), gives us a chance to explore that park from several thousand miles away.

On the two occasions I have walked the High Line, I was impressed that so narrow a park (typically 30 feet and up to 50 feet wide) could take one so far from the urban environment. Yet it only took a glance below it or upward to be reminded of the grit and glory of the city that surrounded it. The engaging and often immersive plantings change as one enters separate “gardens” along the 1.45-mile walk. The polish of the hardscape contrasts with the relative wildness of the plants. Benches and decks encourage lingering, and public art along the way bears close inspection.

The book includes page after page of exquisite photographs taken in all seasons, and it also explains the park’s history, design process, plant choices and ongoing maintenance. It was written and photographed by Piet Oudolf, the Dutch landscape designer who did the park’s plant design, and Rick Darke, a landscape designer, photographer, and former curator of plants at Pennsylvania’s Longwood Gardens. The introduction was written by Robert Hammond, who, in 1999, with Joshua David, founded the nonprofit Friends of the High Line to advocate and foster development of the railway as a park.

When park planning began, the structure, which opened to trains in 1934, had been abandoned since 1980 and was covered by a mix of weeds and native plants. James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf produced the design chosen to reclaim it for a park.

The High Line is essentially a roof garden, 30 feet above the streets; the average depth of the soil is 18 inches. It has wonderfully useful spaces — plazas, seating areas of various types, a water feature that lets people get their feet wet on a hot day. It hosts public art and programs. Its practices are sustainable, including drip irrigation and composting. It attracts and feeds many species of birds and insects.

But for me, the crowning glory of the park, shown and explained well in this new book, are the wildish, though carefully gardened, plantings. Tended by staff and volunteers, the plants, which are 40 percent natives of the eastern or midwestern U.S., are carefully chosen and placed, then gardened with a light hand — more like editing than strictly controlling plant placement. Plants spread, some replace others, new ones are introduced to see how they will compete.

Friends of the High Line provides both paid and volunteer gardeners. Unaesthetic weeds aren’t allowed to interrupt the plantings, and last year’s stalks and seedheads, after lending their charm to a snowy winter, are cut back by volunteers each March.

High Line plantings look like wild landscapes, but with greatly improved aesthetics. It is a style of gardening advocated by the authors of two previous books reviewed in this space: “Chaos Gardening: How to Enrich Landscapes With Self-Seeding Plants,” Jonas Reif, Christian Kress and Jurgen Becker (Timber Press, 2015), and “Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change,” Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher (Timber Press, 2016).

Bay Area landscapes require different plants and maintenance schedules, but the principles of semi-wildness are transferable, and are especially appropriate for gardens built in urban sites. It is easy to imagine the aesthetics and philosophy of the High Line in local private and public spaces.