What determines a project’s footprint? Is it the limits of design and construction, or is it the extent to which the work reaches into the imagination of those who experience it? The Woodland Garden occupies just one acre in the northwest corner of Brooklyn Botanic Garden, but it was designed to touch hundreds more by inspiring residential gardeners to see the possibilities of their own sequestered spaces.

Nestled between Mount Prospect Park, the Native Flora Garden, the Osborne Garden, and a maintenance yard, the Woodland Garden is an enchanting inversion of surrounding oak canopy—a cloistered, garden-scale world that exists both within and apart from the forest. The site’s constricted location and dry microclimate make it analogous to townhouse gardens found across Brooklyn. This prompted the Client to commission a garden that could thrive in an urban backyard as well as it does among naturalized woods.

The Landscape Architect drafted sketches to inform the garden’s shape and feel, compiled plant collages to visualize seasonal variation, and tested iteration after iteration until a final vision was reached. The resulting design features a playful pair of black and white paths that wander through the garden’s centerpiece—an open-air, cast-in-place concrete structure that emerges from the forest as a found ruin. This beguiling frame lends a feeling of otherworldliness but also serves a more practical purpose. The roughly brownstone-lot-sized dimensions enable visitors to readily picture their garden fantasies at scale.

In spring, the walls trap the fragrance of sweetbay magnolias, and the open windows frame views into and out of the garden. Among the twining paths, delicate flowers punctuate an evergreen tapestry of cosmopolitan species adapted to the dry, shady environment and inspired by the site’s former collection of Asian plants. Outside the frame, sedges and ferns thrive beneath the shade of existing oaks, whose autumn leaves spill into the interior and onto a secluded terrace. Weaving together inside and outside, entangled vines sprawl over the cast concrete.

The health of the oaks anchoring the garden was critical to design and implementation. An arborist conducted an independent review, and the concrete structure was adapted to the trees’ extensive root system. Since the garden’s completion in 2020, these specimen oaks have held their dependable presence as the lush, planted subcanopy grows in.
Garden design always puts in question the boundary between cultivated and wild. Here—beneath the old oaks, within the concrete walls, and between the brick paths—the challenge was to overlay these sensibilities. In this way, the Woodland Garden is a quintessential New York landscape. It is born out of constraints, but by