Column in the Osborne Garden of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Nov. 2006

Osborne Garden

This three-acre, Italian-style formal garden is a kaleidoscope of color in May with azaleas, rhododendrons, crabapples, and wisteria draped over wood and stone pergolas.

The art of formal Italian landscaping comes to life in the Osborne Garden, where wisteria-draped pergolas frame an emerald lawn. In spring, daffodils, pansies, and tulips bloom, followed by crab apples and cherries, which gradually give way to azaleas, rhododendrons, and wisterias. The 30,000-square-foot central green is surrounded by a fountain, water basin, stone seats, and soaring columns.

Visitors entering Brooklyn Botanic Garden through the Eastern Parkway Gate find themselves in the three-acre Osborne Garden.

At the north end is a plaza lined with curved seats. At the inner ends of the seats are monolithic dies carrying beautifully carved urns. At each outer end of the seats is a 35-foot-high fluted column. Carved on these columns' bases are leaves of the ginkgo, or maidenhair tree, symbolizing peace and the beauty of the plant world. Between the stone seats is a water basin 16 feet in diameter that contains no fountain but is instead used as an annual flower bed.

A flight of 23 granite steps leads from the Lilac Collection up to the south end of the Osborne Garden. There two curved seats frame a semicircular plaza paved with bluestone. On the inner ends of the seats are coupled, 14-foot-high columns like those in the Boboli Garden in Florence. The focal point of this plaza is a water basin more than 17 feet in diameter. Inside is a fountain, the bowl of which was carved from a piece of Indiana limestone that is said to be the widest ever brought to New York City.

On the east and west sides of the central lawn are walkways through 10 pergolas draped with wisteria. Evergreens and flowering fruit trees such as cherries and crab apples shade the walkways. Rhododendrons and azaleas line the paths, and on the west side is a boulder wall accented with shrubs, perennials, and annuals.

History of the Osborne Garden

Once known as the North Addition or Horticultural Section, the Osborne Garden was one of two parcels of land on the south and east sides of Mount Prospect Reservoir assigned to Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1912.

The Osborne Garden was designed as a showcase for ornamental plants by landscape architect Harold A. Caparn. It was built by laborers in the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration. The Wall Garden on the west side was built in 1934, designed by Caparn, and planted by Montague Free. The original Wall Garden was 385 feet long. The final grading, construction of the 10 pergolas, and foundation planting were completed in the spring of 1935.

The Dean Clay Osborne Memorial—the architectural elements on the north and south ends of the garden—was made possible by a gift of $30,000 from Sade Elizabeth Osborne in memory of her husband. The gift, reported to the trustees at their meeting on October 13, 1938, was subsequently increased to $32,208. The memorial was designed by Caparn with John Theodore Haneman as associate architect. The designs, after acceptance by the donor and the Garden's governing committee, were approved by the New York City Art Commission. The memorial was formally presented on the afternoon of April 19, 1939, the Osbornes' wedding anniversary.

The Eastern Parkway gate was the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Tuch in 1946. The Fawcett Terrace Garden, just west of the Osborne Garden, was dedicated in 1958 as a memorial to Judge Lewis Fawcett by his sisters, Sade Elizabeth Osborne and Mrs. Theodore Frohne.

In 1947, landscape architect Alice Recknagel Ireys designed plantings of large masses of white, red, and pink azaleas, rhododendrons, wisterias, and evergreens to frame the central lawn.

In recent years, it became evident that the eight formal beds of azalea and Japanese holly (Ilex crenata) were in a state of decline. In the fall of 1996, the hollies were removed. They were replaced the following year with 32 Hinoki false cypresses (Chamaecyparis obtusa 'Gracilis'). Between 1999