Founded in 1891 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1967, the garden's 250 acres include a 50-acre tract of never-logged old-growth forest — the largest remnant of the woodland that covered New York City before European settlement.
The grounds are far larger than one visit comfortably covers — anchor a loop around the Haupt Conservatory and the old-growth Thain Family Forest, and reserve timed tickets in advance for the popular seasonal shows.
The garden exists because Nathaniel Lord Britton and Elizabeth Gertrude Britton came back from Kew convinced New York needed the same thing, and carried the Torrey Botanical Club's campaign through to incorporation in 1891. The site they secured had been worked land: part of the Lorillard family's estate, where the Stone Mill of 1840 ground tobacco into snuff using the Bronx River, plus acreage from St John's College, now Fordham. The mill still stands, restored and renamed for Lillian and Amy Goldman in 2010, and it is the most direct reminder that this was a manufacturing river before it was a scenic one.
The reason the founders wanted this particular ground is the forest. Fifty acres of it survive as the Thain Family Forest, which the garden describes as the largest uncut expanse of New York's original wooded landscape, with trees standing that date to the Revolution. Uncut is not the same as untouched: the staff run a continuing program of invasive removal, native planting and research to keep it from converting into something else. The Bronx River cuts through it over a rock gorge and a run of rapids, and this is the stretch of the grounds that changes most across the year — closed and dim in leaf, open and legible in winter when the topography and the river do the work.
The counterweight is the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, built by Lord and Burnham and completed in 1902, a Victorian glasshouse in the crystal-palace tradition that has been overhauled repeatedly since, in 1935, 1950, 1978 and 1993. It is what makes the garden a year-round proposition rather than a seasonal one.
The rest rewards a route rather than a wander across 250 acres. The Rock Garden was designed and installed by Thomas H. Everett in the 1930s; the rose garden was originally laid out by Beatrix Jones Farrand in 1916; the Native Plant Garden opened in 2013. Behind all of it sits the research institution — a herbarium of roughly 7.8 million specimens and the Mertz Library — which is why the place was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1967.
2900 Southern Blvd, Bronx, NY 10458 · Official site ↗
The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is a botanical garden at Bronx Park in the Bronx, New York City. Established in 1891, it is located on a 250-acre (100 ha) site that contains a landscape with over one million living plants; the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a greenhouse containing several habitats; and the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, which contains one of the world's largest collections of botany-related texts. As of 2016, over a million people visit the New York Botanical Garden annually.
This background summary is from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The editorial on this page is ours.