Manhattan Transfer: The Morgan Library Picks Up the Baton in Museum Garden Glamor

It’s a generous act to share a garden with passersby, keeping the perimeters transparent instead of hiding interesting things behind a privacy screen. When a museum allows its garden to be visible from the street, the invitation is there: Buy a ticket and see some more. At the Morgan Library on 36th Street, a blank space around an imposing stone loggia has become a garden destination that can be physically accessed for the first time. It’s a lesson in how to add life and panache to an august survivor of the Gilded Age.

In the spirit of JP Morgan, a patrician collector and banker who grew up in wealth and among beautiful things, the trustees of the Morgan Library have chosen carefully in their commissions, having enlisted Renzo Piano for the 2006 expansion (and the creation of a new public entrance on Madison Avenue) to the original classic by McKim, Mead and White. In 2016, landscape designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, known in the UK for restoring gardens belonging to the Royal Palaces, was brought in to revitalize the space, which he describes as “a whiff of Rome in Midtown Manhattan.”

Describing the campus that runs the length of the library and museum on 36th Street, Todd likens the former lawn to a “plinth” above the street. “There was scope to use this unelaborated ground plane to establish new visual and physical connections among the McKim Library, the Annex, and Renzo Piano’s Piazza–to inscribe it with a new geometry, and to enhance it with antique artifacts that had been acquired by JP Morgan with a view to being placed in his garden.”

“The greatest challenge of this commission was to create a garden that supplied a sense of unity and coherence across the campus,” continues Todd. “One that quietly and playfully complements, but that neither disturbs nor imposes itself upon the existing enfilade of outstanding buildings that form the Library’s East 36th Street frontage.” The result is demure yet fiercely stylish—quite a mix, and something that could be said about the public designs of Russell Page. The late-lamented garden by that British designer at the Frick Collection was once visible behind railings on Fifth Avenue. Undergoing refurbishment, the space will be much reduced when the scaffolding finally comes down.

In 1912, JP Morgan hired a young Beatrix Farrand to make a garden around what was his home, as well as the home of his extensive collections (the library). Her intention was to display antiquities outside the building, bought by Morgan for that purpose. The garden remained undeveloped but Todd Longstaffe-Gowan followed historical clues and embedded these objects in ground patterns laid out in pebbles and cut in bluestone.

Planting along the bronze gates includes Digitalis ferruginea and Heuchera villosa ‘Autumn Bride’ (seen here) as well as the grass Hakonechloa macra. Amsonia ‘Blue Ice’ is also a feature, with tough Aruncus dioicus and Geranium ‘Rozanne’.

Another clue to the success of this elegant garden is in the attention paid to the ground. Inside the library, contrasting marble cut into diamond and rectangular pieces, was inspired by flooring at the Vatican in Rome, and this is continued under the loggia, the shapes being substituted for bluestone in the garden. It is un-grouted, in a similar way to the Tennessee marble of the building which was precision-laid, without cement.

“Like Morgan and McKim, I, too, was guided by historical precedent,” says Longstaffe-Gowan. “I, too, looked to Pirro Ligorio and his Casino Pio IV in the Vatican, where he inscribed patterns on the ground plane to integrate a complex architectural composition.”

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan will be giving a talk on ‘Lost Gardens of London’ at the Garden Museum in London on December 5, 2023.