Landscape Information
Wrapping around the Church of St. Luke’s in the Fields in Manhattan’s West Village, a group of connected garden rooms offer respite from the city. The largest, Barrow Street Garden—at Hudson and Barrow Streets—is approximately two-thirds of an acre and features a brick-walled, quadrated garden accessible from Hudson Street via a path bisecting its eastern quadrant. The Rectory Garden (1842) and South Lawn (1985), south of the church, and the North Garden (1892), to its north, are smaller and more informal.
In the 1820s, the parish was established to support those seeking refuge from yellow fever and smallpox outbreaks in lower Manhattan. A block-wide development by the parent church (James Wells and John Heath, 1822) framed the site with rowhouses set within an agricultural setting. Since that time, the church has supported marginalized local residents. After the demolition of three row houses in 1956, Barrow Street Garden was created as a community oasis by Barbara Ellen Leighton and by the 1980s, the church’s efforts expanded to serving LGBTQ+ teens, unhoused individuals, and elders living with HIV/AIDS.
The Rectory Garden’s first planting was a cutting (not extant after 1990) from the famed British Glastonbury Thorn (a common hawthorn tree) but today features such historic plant materials as a Franklin tree and a Roxburgh rose. It is bounded to the west with the South Lawn’s picturesque, free-standing wall—all that remains of the former parish hall (burned, 1981). The North Garden is dominated by two one-hundred-year-old silver maples. Marking the center of the Barrow Street design is a crab apple tree, encircled by allium and abelia. This room also contains plantings more common in the South (magnolia, crape myrtle, and camellia), which thrive in the garden’s protected southern exposure. Throughout, the garden rooms are connected by flagstone paths and are furnished with benches.
