New Wildflower Meadow at the Brooklyn Museum Entrance

When landscape designer Brook Klausing, the founder of Brook Landscape, was asked to reimagine the front entrance of the Brooklyn Museum, there wasn’t much in the way of a garden to work with. “The museum had large crescent-shaped swaths of lawn that didn’t add anything dynamic to the space,” says Klausing. “It felt like a dead zone up front.” 

The entrance to the McKim, Mead & White building has long been a sore spot for the Museum. When it opened in 1897, visitors entered the Beaux-Arts building via a grand staircase, but by 1935 the steps were in such a state of disrepair that they were removed.  In the early 2000s, the Museum’s director described the Eastern Parkway entrance as “bleak and unwelcoming” and commissioned architect James Stewart Polshek to design a new one. Polshek added the modern glass entrance and also the crescent-shaped strips of grass, which broke up the concrete, but instead of people lounging on the lawn as Polshek imagined, the space became a no man’s land. 

Klausing’s goal was to reinvigorate the space and give the Museum some additional curb appeal. The designer, who had previously led the revamp of the Brooklyn Museum’s sculpture garden, decided to work within the existing crescent shapes for the sake of time and budget. His plan was to soften the space while keeping it visually open as a plaza. He also wanted to disconnect the garden from the street but not completely block it off. “We landed on this idea of a meadow,” he says. Klausing knew just whom to call to help him design it: his longtime friend, ecological horticulturist Rebecca McMackin.

In addition to beauty, Klausing and McMackin wanted to create something that provided meaningful habitat and ecological benefit, an area in which McMackin specializes. While they could have filled the whole crescent lawn in with a meadow, they decided to fill only every other strip to create walking paths within the plants. Klausing says, “We wanted people to be able to engage and experience it firsthand.” 

Planted in May, the space was officially dedicated to philanthropist Iris B. Cantor this past weekend. At the ceremony, Cantor, who is 92 and grew up on Eastern Parkway, said that she was thrilled to see birds and butterflies in front of the museum.

Here are 8 lessons home gardeners can borrow from Klausing and McMackin’s Brooklyn Museum garden:

Photography by Douglas Lyle Thompson.

1. Design for community.