Things to do nearShakespeare Garden

Shakespeare Garden has occupied its gentle hillside in Central Park since 1916, when it was created to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death. The garden was conceived as a living literary reference, planted exclusively with the more than eighty species of flowers, trees, shrubs, and herbs mentioned across Shakespeare's body of work. Maintained by the Central Park Conservancy, it spans roughly four acres on the park's west side between the 79th Street Transverse and Belvedere Castle, and its deliberately informal design feels closer to an English cottage garden than to the manicured formality found elsewhere in the park.

Visitors move along irregular stone paths that rise and curve through plantings of lavender, thyme, rue, columbine, and eglantine rose, among many others. Each labeled plant carries a small plaque citing the relevant lines, turning a simple stroll into a slow reading of the canon. The garden is deliberately modest in scale, which gives it an intimacy that larger park spaces cannot replicate.

On mild afternoons, the upper benches catch a breeze off the Great Lawn and offer a genuinely peaceful place to sit. Because the plantings follow a loose seasonal rhythm, the garden looks and smells different in April than it does in August, making return visits worthwhile. For anyone interested in the intersection of literature, horticulture, and urban landscape design, Shakespeare Garden stands as one of Central Park's most thoughtfully conceived and enduringly rewarding corners.