Heather Garden at Fort Tryon

The Heather Garden at Fort Tryon Park is the largest heather garden in the northeastern United States, a three-acre hillside garden of over 500 varieties of heaths and heathers that bloom in succession from early spring through late fall.

The garden occupies a steep, south-facing hillside below The Cloisters museum, providing views across the Hudson River to the Palisades cliffs of New Jersey. The combination of the heather plantings and the river panorama creates one of the most beautiful garden experiences in the city.

Fort Tryon Park was donated to the city by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1935 after he had the landscape designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm. Rockefeller also purchased the Palisades cliffs across the river to preserve the views from the park.

The heather garden was extensively restored by the Fort Tryon Park Trust beginning in the 1980s, replanting and expanding the collection to create the spectacular display that exists today.

The Heather Garden provides one of the most sublime garden experiences in New York City, a hillside of flowering heathers overlooking the Hudson River from a park given to the city by a Rockefeller who loved it enough to buy the scenery across the river.