The Prospect Park Rose Garden is Getting a Kid-and-Bird-Friendly Glow-Up

By Michael Gonik

The Vale of Cashmere, a secluded former rose garden in Prospect Park that hasn’t produced a bloom in decades, will be getting a facelift over the next 18 months.

At a groundbreaking ceremony on Monday, March 16, the New York City Parks Department and the Prospect Park Alliance officially unveiled a renovation plan for the tucked-away eight acres on the northeast side of the park, a longtime hotspot for birdwatchers and cruising space for queer and gay communities. According to the New York Times, it takes some inspiration from its original designers, Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (who also designed Central Park), by making The Vale a “nature-based play area,” a nod to “the 19th-century version of a playground” the architects sketched out in their master plan for Prospect. “Children were the focal point of our design process from the very beginning,” Prospect Park Alliance president Morgan Monaco told The Times.

The Vale’s redesign also features some bird-friendly upgrades, like a pollinator garden in place of the barren rose garden that once lived there, hoping to attract migratory species of flyers with an arbor and newly planted wild bergamot, yarrow, and pale purple coneflower. As part of a broader restoration scheme, the plan, funded by a 2021 budget allocation of $37.5 million from the De Blasio administration, is slated to remove a good chunk of the invasive and damaged trees in the area, replacing them with over 900 new ones, and add eight new composting bathrooms with no septic system hook-up necessary.

The process is just getting underway, but the Prospect Park Alliance expects the renovation, the planning for which began almost a decade ago, to be complete in the fall of 2027. Until then, large parts of Nellie’s Lawn are expected to be temporarily closed while the work is completed.