Fort Tryon Park

The views of the New Jersey Palisades alone make this sylvan landscape one of the city's prettiest places, but it's further elevated by the graceful walkways and overflowing perennial beds of its pastoral Heather Garden. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Fort Tryon Park is 250 feet above the Hudson River and boasts three landscaped acres that look as if they were transplanted from an English country estate house, with sloping and dropping elms. Many of the garden's 48 varieties of heaths and heathers are unique to New York City, and some bloom even in winter, their needlelike leaves turning copper to chocolate. Summer, however, is always the best time to go: The plots become a genteel wilderness, riotous with musk roses, foxglove, hydrangeas and irises.