Spotlight: Not-So-Secret Garden

During visits to my sister and her family in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, we’d sometimes slip away to the Arnold Arboretum, a ten-minute walk from their backyard. No matter the weather, the 281-acre preserve, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, was the kind of place that rewarded wandering—a patchwork of pathways and circuitous routes that seemed to reorder themselves like an analemmatic sundial. On a fall day, the sharpness of the air would be filled with the scent of spruce and pine, while the maple trees, to borrow a line from neighboring Brookline’s famed Modernist poet Amy Lowell, “glittered with the tumbling of leaves.” Guided by my sister’s opportune horticultural knowhow—I wouldn’t know rhododendron from rhubarb—those walks were less about exercise than recalibration, a way of feeling returned to myself from Manhattan’s concrete confines through nature, motion and air.

That same inner harmonizing has no doubt accorded many hikers who’ve visited the Mountain Top Arboretum in Tannersville, NY. Open every day of the year, perched at 2,400 feet in the northern Catskills, it’s less a manicured garden than a living dialogue between elevation and environment. Across its 200 acres, the multitude of native conifers and berry-laden shrubs give way to meadow and Devonian-era bedrock; a network of trails through evergreens leads to the forest edge, the rolling Catskills spilling out against a panoramic blue sky. It is, as its founders intended, a place for observation and instruction—the Arboretum’s timber frame Education Center hosts workshops along with other events, programs and guided walks—as well as for recreation, a landscape that changes not just with the seasons, but with one’s disposition.

A hardened city dweller, I’ve become partial to winter. The air burns a little in my lungs, and snow crusts over the edge of sidewalks, for a little while, anyway. It’s the kind of cold-hardy resilience required to appreciate the Mountain Top Arboretum’s wintertime flora and austere beauty: hemlocks glisten; an elevated boardwalk protects the bog’s marshy ground ecosystems; and the natural curves of a stream—part of the watershed that supplies most of New York City’s drinking water—make a hike in the snow not an act of endurance but of renewal, each breath bright, each step clarifying.

By March, everything will no doubt shift again. But bracing winter walks stay with me most. At the Mountain Top Arboretum’s altitude, even the silence must feel crisp.