One of the great pleasures of travelling is spending time in a city’s parks and gardens and the fact that it is winter should be no impediment. It might not be the time of year to sunbathe, enjoy spring and summer flowers, and go boating, but there is a quiet enjoyment in walking through a winter landscape.

I find I notice the bones of the park more - the outlines of the trees with the mesh of branches and birds’ nests interlaced against the sky and the layout of paths and rock formations. The colours are different, mostly muted pastels and neutrals of bark and stone but also the shocking emerald green of moss against a dark, moist trunk, and the deep scarlet of winter berries.

On my recent trip to New York I made a special effort to visit some of the city’s parks and gardens despite the season, and I wasn’t disappointed. I have already spent time in Hyde Park since my return to London and I am pondering a trip to Kew Gardens in a coming weekend.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

There are botanic gardens in every borough of New York but Brooklyn Botanic Garden is one of the most popular, with 52 acres next door to the Brooklyn Museum and Prospect Park. I’m told the garden is most spectacular in spring when the cherry blossoms are in bloom. Meanwhile, I imagine the rose garden and a Shakespearean garden with plants from the bard’s plays and poetry are probably best enjoyed in summer.

But the grounds are lovely in winter, if less showy, and particularly the Japanese Garden. There is a huge pond, fringed with trees and plants and a wooden pagoda on the water’s edge. The pond, encircled by a stone path and crossed with a small arched bridge, has a veneer of thin ice and a large wooden structure, bright orange-red in the shape of a Japanese character, emerges from the centre. This is a torii and indicates the presence of a shrine nearby; the shrine itself is up the hill secluded within a pine grove.

The Botanic Garden also has some outstanding conservatories with displays including bonsais, orchids, desert flora, and rainforest. This is also a great place to catch your breath and have a coffee especially if it’s a cold day.

My visit to the Botanic Garden, on my last day in New York, coincided with a walking tour on how to best enjoy the gardens in winter and how to beat the winter blues. I stumbled across the group about 10 minutes into the tour and decided to join in. It was led by Lynne Spevack, a volunteer at the garden and a qualified psychologist, so her tour mixed in highlights of the park and an explanation about what was special or unique in winter, with advice on beating the winter blues. (Tips included getting a daily quota of daylight, keeping a regular exercise routine, the use of special lamps, getting away for a holiday if possible).

Unbeknownst to me, a reporter for the New York Times was also on the tour and he has written a travel piece, which appeared last weekend. I came across this entirely by accident but I was tickled about it because I am in the photograph - the one standing on the far right in the floppy wide-brimmed hat! The next tour is February 3 and it is free with the $8 admission to the garden.

Wildlife in the city

I also visited both Prospect Park in Brooklyn and returned to Central Park in Manhattan. On Christmas day my friend and I went for a walk through Prospect Park and were surprised by how many people were out and about. The road around the park was quite busy with joggers, cyclists, inline skaters and skateboarders. Wollman Ice Rink was open and filled with skaters whirling around on the ice to the tune of Silent Night. Japanese wedding parties were having their photos taken in the Oriental Pavilion. Old men were standing by the shore feeding the ducks and Canadian geese, flapping their enormous wings on the icy water. The only thing we needed to complete the picture was a blanket of snow to create the perfect image of a White Christmas.

The following week I met a friend in Manhattan and we took a walk through Central Park. This time of year is one of the peak tourist times and I don’t think that Central Park is ever truly quiet, except maybe up in the far northern end. Certainly when we went it was full of people. Skating was a feature once again - ice skating on one of the two rinks in Central Park, and elsewhere a group of rollerskaters dancing with music blaring from two enormous speakers. There were horse and carriage rides through the park but we preferred to ride a painted wooden horse on the old-fashioned carousel.

What I didn’t expect to see was wildlife - this was hardly a safari. But New York is nothing if not surprising and in both parks I saw a wild hawk. I was amazed enough in Prospect Park but to see another one a few days later in Central Park really impressed me. It was eating and we could see white feathers - or fur, I’m not sure which - flying off the tree as it pulled apart its victim. In London the city authorities keep tame hawks to keep the pigeon population down, but these were wild. I’m told that both parks are large enough to provide habitat for birds of prey and that there are probably plenty of rodents for them to hunt.

Ghostly encounters

It’s not quite a park or a garden but another place for a winter stroll is Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. This is the resting place for scores of prominent Brooklynites, from Frank Morgan who played the wizard in Wizard of Oz to Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, first black woman doctor in New York State. We didn’t have a map but stumbled across the grave for Henry Bergh, the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He had a huge pyramid, with an equally big casting of a horse, chickens, dog and cat on the ground beneath. Mostly the graveyard was filled with Victorian-era gravestones, particularly angels but also some rather impressive mausoleums and tombs that looked to be bigger than my London flat. Winter is perfect for a graveyard stroll - on the day of our visit it was overcast with a soft mist, and it would be even better in the snow. My only tip is to keep an eye on the time because some exits close earlier than others and it can be a long hike from one end of the cemetery to the other.