{"id":7060315,"date":"2026-09-18T19:17:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T19:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/paula-hayess-first-public-garden-is-36-minutes-from-grand-central\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T19:17:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T19:17:08","slug":"paula-hayess-first-public-garden-is-36-minutes-from-grand-central","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7060315","title":{"rendered":"Paula Hayes\u2019s First Public Garden Is 36 Minutes From Grand Central"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lyndhurst sits on a hill above the Hudson in Tarrytown, 36 minutes by train from Grand Central. Helen Gould, who ran the estate from 1892, built an overlook there around 1905 that Lyndhurst still calls her \u201ctreehouse,\u201d a raised deck wrapped around a white birch, and it was gone by the 1960s. When Lyndhurst rebuilt the deck, Paula Hayes, the sculptor and land artist known for her terrariums and for the Gazing Globes that glowed in Madison Square Park in 2015, planted a pollinator garden of native grasses around it, laid out as a mandala and set with three Gazing Globes, a purple birdbath and a bronze gnome. It is the first landscape she has made that anyone can visit, and she calls it \u201ca continuation of her care for this site, made in a vocabulary only available a hundred years later.\u201d We asked her how it came together, ahead of the Sunset Soir\u00e9e at the overlook on September 10.<\/p>\n
Helen Gould\u2019s Treehouse at Lyndhurst<\/h2>\n
Helen Gould built the overlook here around 1905, what Lyndhurst still calls her \u201ctreehouse,\u201d a raised deck wrapped around a white birch. Why couldn\u2019t the birch come back, and what did that decide for the garden around it?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Paula Hayes:<\/strong> Betula papyrifera (paper birch) are not being planted in the Northeast because of bronze birch borer, birch leafminers, and shorter lifespans due to heat intolerance (climate change). We decided that the planting around a larger wood observation deck could have the magic of moving leaves, changes in the seasons, gathering, observing the river and the house, and getting the kids out of the house as Helen Gould wanted to do pre-AC, in Victorian time\u2014plus the inclusion of my sculptural works that guide the public toward different ways of moving through the landscape and experiencing points of view in physical and internal ways.<\/p>\nPaula Hayes, \u201cGazing Globes,\u201d in \u201cThe Paula Hayes Garden\u201d at Lyndhurst,\u00a02026. Photo by Clifford Pickett.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPaula Hayes, \u201cGazing Globe,\u201d with Lyndhurst mansion at dusk,\u00a02026. Photo by Clifford Pickett.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n
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The clover is doing the real work underneath, low to the ground, drawing the bees in while the bluestem and switchgrass do their thing above it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
From the path the garden looks like a meadow. You only see the mandala once you climb up to the overlook. Was that the plan from the start?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Hayes:<\/strong> Absolutely\u2014I wanted the enjoyment of the garden to be experienced from many vantage points, and discoveries\u2014like, as you say, being able to see a larger form by being perched in the overlook, the viewing platform\u2014getting a view like the treehouse of the Victorian time.<\/p>\n
Paula Hayes on the Bees and the Bluestem<\/h2>\n
You planned the planting with landscape architect Andrew Moore. How did you choose the plants, and which ones are the bees going for?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Hayes:<\/strong> The bees are moving through the landscape and love many of the plants\u2014right now they love the white clover we seeded beneath the grasses. Andrew and I wanted the grasses for their movement and their seasonal color, but the clover is doing the real work underneath, low to the ground, drawing the bees in while the bluestem and switchgrass do their thing above it. Earlier in the season it\u2019s the dogwood and magnolia at the edge of the site pulling them in, and by fall the grasses themselves will seed out and the bees move on to whatever\u2019s left blooming nearby\u2014so the planting is really feeding them in shifts across the whole year, not all at once.<\/p>\n
The \u201cGazing Globes,\u201d the Birdbath and the Gnome<\/h2>\n
The birdbath is the same one that stood in MoMA\u2019s sculpture garden, tinted purple this time to match the grasses. What made you bring it here, and why purple?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Hayes:<\/strong> Purple is a dominant color of the little bluestem, and an underlying color in many plants throughout the garden\u2014so tinting a birdbath let it settle into the palette rather than stand apart from it.<\/p>\n
You write that the Gazing Globes \u201cbecome whatever arrives at them,\u201d light, weather, a passerby\u2019s reflection. They first stood in Madison Square Park in 2015, in the middle of the city. What is different about them in a garden above the river?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Hayes:<\/strong> In Madison Square Park they were reflecting the city back at itself\u2014traffic, buildings, crowds moving past. Here they\u2019re holding the river, the sky, the change of weather over the Hudson, and whoever comes to the overlook. The globes don\u2019t have all the content on their own; they become whatever arrives at them, so moving them from a plaza to a meadow changes almost everything about what they show, without changing the object at all.<\/p>\n\n
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It\u2019s a deployed symbol, planted into a landscape that\u2019s otherwise asking to be taken literally. I like that friction.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
Tell us about the gnome.<\/strong><\/p>\n
Hayes:<\/strong> Mine isn\u2019t a garden gnome so much as an abstraction of one\u2014a suggestion. It reads as something emerging from the ground, a plant form, blended with a gnome\u2019s hat, perhaps, so you\u2019re not quite sure where the vegetal ends and the figure begins. I don\u2019t think of it as ornamental, even though it borrows the vocabulary of ornament\u2014the same way the gazing globe does. It\u2019s a deployed symbol, planted into a landscape that\u2019s otherwise asking to be taken literally. I like that friction. It\u2019s part of the \u201ccasual ceremonies\u201d thread I\u2019ve carried since 1991\u2014bringing something familiar and almost kitsch into a space of real attention, so the whole experience isn\u2019t exactly solemn. The gnome is watching, the same way the birdbath and the globes are watching, and half-grown from the earth itself, though partly industrial, and all human-hand made.<\/p>\nPaula Hayes, bronze gnome in \u201cThe Paula Hayes Garden\u201d at Lyndhurst,\u00a02026. Courtesy of Lyndhurst.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
For a New Yorker who takes the train up this September, what should they look for that they would have missed in June?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Hayes:<\/strong> By September the little bluestem is turning, and that purple that\u2019s underneath so many of the plants all summer starts to surface\u2014you\u2019ll see it echoed in the birdbath now. The meadow reads differently once the grasses go warm and coppery instead of green, so the mandala from the overlook has a completely different color logic than it did in early summer. And the bees will be on different plants than they were in June, so it\u2019s worth watching what\u2019s actually being visited now versus what seems intended as purely decorative.<\/p>\nPaula Hayes. Courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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