The Met Cloisters is one of the gardens profiled in The Garden Tourist’s Mid-Atlantic.

A branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters is the only museum dedicated to the art of the Middle Ages in the United States. Incorporating five medieval cloisters, the museum evokes the architecture of the Middle Ages and displays medieval metalwork, painting, sculpture, stained glass, and textiles. It is also renowned for its three cloister gardens, which were designed as an integral part of the museum when it was built in 1938.

The Romanesque Cuxa Cloister was originally part of a 12th-century Benedictine monastery in the northeast Pyrenees. Its columns and octagonal fountain are carved from a mottled pink-and-white marble found in Languedoc. The Judy Black Garden within this cloister is divided into quadrants by crossed paths. Each quadrant features a grass plot with a pollarded apple tree bordered by ornamental flowers and herbs that add beauty and fragrance. Medieval plants are supplemented with modern varieties to provide a long season of bloom, beginning with early crocuses and snowdrops, followed by columbines, pinks, bellflowers, foxgloves, daisies, poppies, and many other flowers that bloom until late fall. In winter the arcades are glassed in, and the interior walkways are filled with pots of citrus, jasmine, rosemary, and bay.

The Gothic Bonnefont Cloister comes from a Cistercian abbey in southwest France and dates back to 1300. This is a medieval herb garden with garden beds arranged symmetrically around a 15th-century Venetian wellhead. It features more than 400 species of plants and herbs used in the Middle Ages. Some were grown in gardens while others were collected from the wild or imported in dried form.

Plants are grown in raised beds enclosed with wattle fences and grouped according to their medieval use: cooking, medicine, art, industry, housekeeping, love, fertility, and magic. Tender plants such as turmeric, ginger, frankincense, and cardamom are grown in terra-cotta pots that can be moved inside in winter. Adjacent to the Bonnefont Garden is an orchard of lady apples and other medieval fruits such as medlar, quince, currants, and elderberries. The trees are underplanted with a meadow of spring bulbs and colorful summer flowers and herbs.

The Gothic Trie Cloister is from the Trie-en-Bigorre region of southwest France. It dates to the late 15th century, and its exuberant carvings portray biblical scenes and saints’ legends as well as grotesques and coats of arms. Of The Cloister’s three gardens, this one is the most informal. It is a colorful fantasy garden of flowers and fruits based on the Unicorn Tapestries. It features more than 50 species of plants found in the famous tapestries, including many varieties of pinks, violets, primroses, bellflowers, and wild strawberries.

The Met Cloisters, 99 Margaret Corbin Rd., Fort Tryon Park, New York, NY metmuseum.org

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The three-acre Heather Garden is the crown jewel of Fort Tryon Park with a stunning 600-foot perennial border punctuated with heaths and heathers as well as other flowering trees and shrubs. It began as the vision of John D. Rockefeller who collaborated with the Olmsted Brothers to create a picturesque park overlooking the Hudson River.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Fort Tryon was home to several beautiful estates. Rockefeller began acquiring these estates as they came up for sale, gradually assembling 67 acres that he gave to the city for a public park. Rockefeller hired the illustrious Olmsted Brothers firm to design Fort Tryon Park in their signature picturesque landscape style that would preserve the spectacular vistas of the Hudson River and the Palisades. The Heather Garden was to be a distinct area of beauty within the park, built into the side of a rocky ridge. Low-growing heather was chosen as the predominant plant so it would not obscure the views. The site provided many challenges with its steep, rocky topography and thin soil. It took four years to transform it into a manicured landscape with promenades, stone retaining walls, terraced wooded slopes, lush gardens, and eight miles of paths for pedestrians.

Since its completion in 1935, the park has been restored several times. The latest renovation of the Heather Garden was completed in 2010 by landscape designers Lynden B. Miller and Ronda M. Brands. The result is a spectacular flower garden with 550 varieties of plants.

The garden is bisected by a central path. On one side is the perennial border with old-world roses, historic azaleas, hydrangeas, and other flowering shrubs that provide year-round structure for the ever-changing tapestry of perennials. On the other side of the path is the heather bed, anchored by several historic yews and a massive Siberian elm. More than 30 varieties of heaths and heathers hark back to the garden’s original design. They are set amidst companion plantings of perennials, conifers, and ornamental trees. The topography and plantings vary from rocky slopes hosting delicate alpines to meadow-style plantings of sun-loving perennials.

In the spring, flowering dogwoods, rhododendrons, and azaleas complement peonies, candytuft, Siberian irises, poppies, and salvias. Summer brings on yarrows, hibiscus, globe thistles, roses, catmint, and astilbes. Butterfly weeds, red hot pokers, black-eyed Susans, and coneflowers provide food for pollinators. In the fall, dramatic color arrives with spectacular fall foliage and the blooms of asters, anemones, stonecrops, and hydrangeas. Throughout the seasons, foliage plants like purple smoke bush and heuchera provide long-lasting pops of color while clematis, hyacinth bean, and other vines trained on teepees add vertical interest.