By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo News Editor
UPPER EAST SIDE — It’s like a secret garden.
Inside the New York Society Library's townhouse at 53 East 79th St. are images of giant tulips, roses and poppies.
They are details from the books encased below them, part of an exhibit called "Writing the Garden."
Co-curated by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founding president of the Central Park Conservancy, the library has sifted through 300,000 books, culling highlights of writers with green thumbs like Edith Wharton, Celia Thaxter and Jane Loudon.
The library — the city's oldest, founded in 1754, long before public libraries existed — is membership-only, and in this day of e-books and iPads, its members have a strong passion for the printed word. One user, a retired doctor, comes to the reading room every day dressed in a suit and derby hat for his morning papers.
But even though the library's stacks, which include rare books dating as far back as 1472, are closed to the public, the exhibition space on the second floor — where the garden show will run through December — is free for anyone to visit.
On the library's earliest ledger, from 1789 to 1792 — which was recently digitized and went online in November — some famous members included George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and John Jay, head librarian Mark Bartlett noted.
Today, many of the 3,100 families who are members are residents in the surrounding neighborhood, young families who come to use the children's library and retired New Yorkers who like the comfort of the wood-paneled rooms.
Bartlett has begun noticing a growing membership from downtown and even Brooklyn, and it's always been a favorite of writers, from Washington Irving and Herman Melville to Wendy Wasserstein and Tom Wolfe.
Many of the library's members are avid gardeners, or at least armchair gardeners, the show's co-curator Harriet Shapiro said. Lots of the books used in the show are well worn from frequent use.
Seeing "revered and read" books like The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page, a landscape designer who worked for Oscar de la Renta and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor among others, or Katherine White's Onward and Upward in the Garden, her collection of New Yorker essays, on display gives the books a new context in how they interact with each other, Shapiro said.
"We make the past come alive," she said, of the selections that "are not how-to books," rather "they are books that reflect the writer who loves to garden."
"Their pages are filled with plant knowledge, fresh ideas, rhapsodic sentiments, fiercely held opinions, wry humor, epistolary friendships and philosophical musings," the show's wall text said. "Collectively, they constitute a conversation among authors stretching across two centuries."
Rogers, herself a library member, "is a huge force in the world of gardening," Shapiro said. "And we're three minutes from Central Park. It made it a natural fit."
Several of the library's earliest borrowers also loved to garden, like Washington.
It turns out that the nation's first president had borrowed two books from the library when the capitol was on Wall Street at Federal Hall, and failed to return them.
Librarians uncovered the missing books last year, calculating his fine would be $300,000 for being 220 years late.
"He was busy gardening," Shapiro said of Washington's forgetting to return the books.
