Restoring the South Garden in Central Park's Conservatory Garden

I am the studio director of the landscape architecture team in the Capital Projects office. I lead a team of landscape architects and the projects that are related to the restoration and stewardship of the park. My name is Diane Schaub. I work for Central Park Conservancy and I've been doing that for 28 years now. I get to work with a lot of flowers which is fabulous. Our primary process for designing the South Garden was twofold. We studied the existing garden but we also looked back at the historic documentation to understand what the original drawing said, what interventions may have been made over time so that we could respond accordingly to them. The garden was built in 1937. It was designed by landscape architect Gilmore Clark and planting designer M. Betty Sprout. They were actually married. A lot of the plants that you see here are plants that have been here for the 28 years that I've been here and were there for 10 years before that. It's really extraordinary how long-lived these things could be. So that's a tradition that we want to maintain here in the park, in this garden. My process of curating the garden post-restoration is an ongoing project. In addition to replanting these hedges and trying to shape them and turn them into more of a structural element in the garden, there were plants that we had to remove that I now think to myself, would something else work better in that space? Because a lot of things happen in a garden that you don't plan and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're bad, but you reevaluate everything all the time. One of the primary sustainability aspects that we did with our improvements centers around the fountains. This fountain in this garden, the Burnett fountain, and then the other two fountains in the other gardens were what we call flow-through fountains, meaning water enters the fountains and then it just leaves by drain and it's incredibly wasteful. So our improvements include a recirculation system that recirculates the water. It gets reused, resulting in significant water savings. Similarly with the irrigation system, it's been upgraded to be a more modern system that uses less water but still supports the plants that are here. When people come to this garden, I want them to be really impressed. I want them to be wowed. I want them to look at individual plants and appreciate those things and the way that they work together as an ensemble is really important. If you come more often, you start to see the garden as this wonderful painting. I want people to come back and see how it changes over the seasons. Each time you visit the garden, first of all, enjoy it. Realize how much care it takes 365 days of the year to make it look as beautiful as it does now and then consider volunteering or donating to support that cause over time.