New York City’s Secluded Gardens Provide Escape from Urban Blight : Hustle and bustle seem miles away amid the flower beds in three public properties.

Businessmen and women come here to make deals. Tourists come for the theater, music and opera, the museums and galleries.

Almost nobody comes to see the public gardens. So it may surprise some visitors to learn that New York City also has, amid its daunting masses of concrete and steel, its mile after blighted mile of urban squalor, some of the finest public gardens in the country. A surge of new private effort and money is enhancing these city-owned gardens and improving them to make them more attractive to New Yorkers and visitors alike, places of quiet escape from the sharp elbows and racket of New York life.

I recently visited three of the best of these gardens, all situated in corners of the city that the average tourist is unlikely to stumble upon. One of them, the Conservatory Garden, lies near the northeast corner of Central Park and is little known even to most New Yorkers. Another, the very large New York Botanical Garden, is better known, but often--and wrongly--thought to be inaccessible because it is situated in the Bronx. A third, Wave Hill, sits in a far, leafy corner of the Bronx above the Hudson River, again scarcely known by New Yorkers and visitors alike.

Southern Californians live in one vast garden in perpetual flower. But in most of New York, private gardens are gardenias or geraniums struggling to live on a sunny windowsill; only the fortunate have a patch of terrace or small bit of ground as often as not in continuous shade. The city’s public gardens are therefore all the more to be prized.

The fenced, six-acre Conservatory Garden in Central Park is to other public gardens what the Frick Museum is to other New York museums: formal, elegant, not too large, a place where beauty has been arranged to please the eye and expand the mind. It gets its name from the plant conservatories that formerly stood there.

You enter from Fifth Avenue near 105th Street through the black wrought-iron gate made in Paris in 1894 for the old Vanderbilt Mansion on Fifth Avenue. Ahead lies the central garden, a crisp green half-acre of lawn flanked by allees of crab-apple trees, white and pink in the spring. Beyond is a fountain, above it semi-circular hedges of evergreen and deciduous shrubs, and at the top a pergola with a 50-year-old wisteria vine. And yet beyond is a hill, which encircles the space and is planted naturalistically in contrast to the precise squares, oblongs and circles of the flat formal garden.

“Isn’t this the most restful place you ever saw?” a man who said he lived in Harlem remarked to me one spring day as we stood at this spot. The Conservatory Garden, which is funded by private contributions, is proud that it attracts as both visitors and cleanup crews neighbors from both black and Spanish Harlems to the north. People hold weddings on the lawn for a token fee of $25.

To the right is the North Garden, a severely classic French garden with a fountain of three maidens surrounded by two concentric circles of flat flower beds, which in spring are filled with 20,000 tulips and in fall with 5,000 chrysanthemums. Four rose arbors arch over the entrances to the North Garden.

On the other side of the Central Garden is the South Garden, which is my favorite, an attitude encouraged by my brother James, a horticulturalist who has the great good fortune to be the assistant curator of the Conservatory Garden, and who introduced me to its delights.

I like it because children like it. You can often find them there at play. In the center is a reflecting pool in which stand statues of Mary and Dickon, children in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book “The Secret Garden.” There are benches for storytelling.

I like this garden also because of its perennials, of interest in every season, many different greens and grays, spiky plants, smooth plants, massive and dainty, blooming in spring, summer and fall--ladies’ mantle, cranesbill, lungwort, Siberian iris, fern-leaf yarrow, astilbe, lamb’s ears, Aster frikartii, Coreopsis, helianthus, New York Ironweed--175 kinds, some new each year, about 3,500 plants in all. The beds are horseshoe-shaped.

Above the formal plantings at the edge of the woods is the Woodland Garden, ferns, Virginia bluebells, Mayapples and the like. And in a new, more open section are, among other plants, some old roses.

The garden is funded by the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy and directed by Linden B. Miller, something of a star on the New York horticultural scene. She designed the handsome, recently opened, block-long Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at 41st Street.

If the Conservatory is the Frick Collection of New York public gardens, the New York Botanical Garden is its Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s big: 250 acres. It tries to be comprehensive. It has a famous horticultural school and does serious scientific work. To get there you have to go through some of the more ragged sections of the Bronx, but you can do so safely and it’s worth it for the sense of space and beauty and the native forest of old trees. It lies near Fordham University’s Bronx campus in the north-central Bronx.

It would be exhausting if you tried to do it all at once. But then you don’t have to.

If you go by train, which is easy, a five-minute walk from the station brings you to the visitor center. There you can take a 20-minute tram tour, probably a good idea for an overview.

For visitors from Southern California, there are two gardens of special interest: an authentically gravelly rock garden with many dainty flowers that we can’t grow in our mild climate, and, for nostalgic former Easterners, a native plants garden. They adjoin and are five minutes by foot from the visitor center. There is the forest, which has the oldest and largest trees in the city. I’ve been there only on a wintry March day; it looks like a cool place to walk in summer. The trees are preserved because the garden was once the estate of Pierre Lorillard, the tobacco magnate. There is a pleasant snuff mill, built in 1848. It has a cafe, and you can rent the mill for a party.

There is the Peggy Rockefeller rose garden. There is a fine perennial garden designed by Linden Miller.

And there is the splendid Victorian glass-and-iron Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, designed after London’s Kew Gardens, which has tropical plants and the like, and, in the spring, a profusion of forced and fragrant flowers.

The New York Botanical Garden has special shows and events throughout the spring, summer and fall.

Harder to get to, but rewarding for the effort, is Wave Hill, a 28-acre former estate overlooking the Hudson River in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Its situation, high on a hill from which you gaze over the glittering mile-wide Hudson to the steep Palisades on the New Jersey shore; its history, the stone main house was lived in by Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain and Arturo Toscanini, among others, and its intricately crafted gardens, make it a special place. Given to the city in 1960, Wave Hill is run by a private, nonprofit group. It restored the two houses on the estate and supported the building of its several gardens by their director, Marco Polo Stufano, a notable figure in American horticulture.

Some wonderful trees are set about the lawns, among them a huge American elm, a massive sugar maple and five 100-year-old copper beeches.

My favorite among the Wave Hill gardens is the Wild Garden, in which plants from five continents have been assembled and cunningly juxtaposed in a way that looks oddly natural. A new flower garden has been developed to recall the profusion of an American garden of 50 years ago. It is pleasant to walk through the grounds at Wave Hill and think of the delicious shad running in the Hudson in the spring and of the continent falling away beyond the forbidding Palisades all the way to California.

GUIDEBOOK: New York for Garden Lovers

Conservatory Garden: The easiest way to the Conservatory Garden from midtown Manhattan is by taxi. Or take buses M1, M2, M3 and M4 north on Madison Avenue; they run south on Fifth Avenue in front of the garden. If you take the Lexington Avenue subway, avoid the stop at 103rd Street; it’s not always safe. Instead, get off at 96th Street and walk west to Fifth Avenue, then north.

Admission is free. The garden is open every day from 8 a.m. until dusk.

New York Botanical Garden: It’s 20 minutes by comfortable train on the Metro-North Railroad ($3.25 one way) from Grand Central Terminal to the well-marked stop at the garden’s main gate. A van runs three times a day each way between the garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History. For reservations, call (212) 220-8700.

Admission is a suggested $3 for adults and $2 for seniors, children 6 to 16 and students. The best bet is a $5 combination ticket for adults ($3 for the other categories) that’s good for admission, a tram ride and admission to the Conservatory, Rock Garden and Native Plants Garden. Otherwise, the conservatory is $3, a round-trip tram ride is $1 and admission to the Rock Garden and native Plants Garden is $1 for both.

The Snuff Mill River Terrace Cafe, on the banks of the Bronx River, serves cafeteria food year-round. The open-air Tulip Tree cafe is open April through October. There are two shops.

The garden is open Tuesdays through Sundays, from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. April through October, and from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. the rest of the year.

Wave Hill: Getting to Wave Hill by public transportation is complicated and you don’t end up very close. Unless you’re driving--it’s at 675 West 252nd St., in the Riverdale section of the Bronx--I recommend using the Riverdale van system, called Mosholu Limousine (212-543-6900). Vans run every half-hour to and from Riverdale on regular routes up and down the east and west sides of Manhattan, as far south as 14th Street. Call the company and you will be told where and when to go to be picked up. The van drops you right at Wave Hill and will pick you up there to go back downtown. The fare is $4.25 each way. On nice days, Fridays through Sundays, Wave Hill serves refreshments.

Wave Hill is open every day except Mondays. Weekdays are free; admission on weekends and holidays is $2 for adults, $1 for seniors and students. For information and directions, call (212) 549-3200.

All three gardens are owned by the city of New York, which is in such poor financial shape that each depends on private support and/or voluntary admission fees.