Water Tower Grove | A garden in the Manhattan sky

Landscape design by VERDANT.

Above the streets of Manhattan’s Flatiron district sits Water Tower Grove – a reinvigorated terrace garden that’s now a layered landscape, connecting architecture, planting and city life. For the homeowners, it’s become a pocket of calm in the buzzing city.

Making connections

The owners wanted to rework a rooftop garden, creating a space that was easier for daily use and better connected to their home below. From their bedroom, the view felt cut off from the main garden platform above and movement across the levels of the property was awkward.

The brief to garden designers VERDANT, a design-build studio from Brooklyn, was to be as creative as possible with ideas. The challenge was to create stronger visual and physical connections – linking bedroom to garden, and garden to skyline – while ensuring every element is enduring and true to its surroundings.

Shifting perspectives

The brief opened the door for original and inspiring ideas, including a striking floating staircase of corten and galvanised steel designed by VERDANT (and fabricated by collaborators), which acts as both sculptural feature and key view corridor from the bedroom.

Other unique elements include asymmetric trellising cables, and recessed planters that used the existing steel structure from old water towers, allowing a grove of hophornbeam trees to rise directly from the terrace without visible containers. The result is a series of green canopies that shift with the seasons, echoing the rooftop silhouettes that define the Flatiron skyline.

The choice of materials was key: weathered corten and charred Shou Sugi Ban timber offer a rough-edged beauty; while native sumac and a clever mini meadow adds texture and life, ensuring the garden changes subtly through the year.

A new outlook

The rooftop now feels cohesive – an easy transition between living space and open sky.

The staircase is a focal point of the garden but also acts as a processional experience, leading you upward through the space, into the grove above, while the garden itself provides dappled shade and a sense of retreat from the city below.

It’s a space where old industrial structure and new landscape design work in concert – a blend of modernism, minimalism and the unexpected. From the street, the grove of trees nods to the surrounding water towers; and from within, it offers a view of Manhattan framed by leaves.

Key Plant List:

Trees

Ostrya virginiana (American hophornbeam)

Shrubs

Rhus aromatica (fragrant sumac)
Rhus glabra (smooth sumac)
Leucothoe auxillaris
Myrica pensylvanica (bayberry)
Kalmia latifolia (mountain laurel)
Hydrangea quercifolia (oakleaf hydrangea)
Vaccinium corymbosum (highbush blueberry)

Vines

Parthenocissus quinquefolia (Virginia creeper)
Parthenocissus henryana (silver vein creeper)
Clematis montana ‘Grandiflora’

Perennials

Sagina subulata (Irish moss)
Hernaria glabra (Rupturewort)
Euonymous fortunei ‘Kewensis’ (miniature wintercreeper)
Asarum europeum (European wild ginger)
Carex pensylvanica (Pennsylvania sedge)
Dryopteris erythrosora (autumn fern)
Ajuga ‘Chocolate Chip’

Meadow

Deschampsia cespitosa (tufted hairgrass)
Aquilegia canadensis (eastern red Columbine)
Tiarella cordifolia (heartleaf foamflower)
Echinacea purpurea (coneflower)
Liatris spicata (blazing star)
Pycnanthemum muticum (mountain mint)
Sanguisorba tenuifolia (burnet)
Symphyotrichum cordifolius (blue wood aster)
Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’