Emile Brunel’s Sculpture Garden
Born in 1874, Emile Brunel’s extraordinary life charts a course from the French countryside to New York City, across the United States to the American West, and back to his beloved land in The Catskills — where a vision was born.
The view of Brunel Park from Route 28 circa 1935.
Check out our online Botanical Exhibition on our free Bloomberg Connects Digital Guide!
Brunel Park features a plethora of native horticulture and serves as a tranquil, healing, inclusive, and reflective space for visitors and residents. The Park also features stand-out plant species known for their beauty, fragrance, four-season interest, and delicious taste, many of which may be unknown to even the most devoted plant enthusiast.
This Botanical Exhibition is designed as a companion piece to the Bloomberg Connects Audio Tour. It follows a sequence that loosely parallels the way in which visitors might encounter these plants during the Audio Tour. The names of plants, herbs, berries, and trees with significance to the Esopus Munsee are included with detailed information drawn from Evan Pritchard’s 2019 book “Herbs are Verbs.” ENJOY!!
Our Horticultural Ethos
The Brunel Sculpture Garden celebrates and reveals the spirit of our native plants as medicine, food, and elements of sacred ceremony. Our plants not only provide visual beauty and emotional support to our visitors (and the local pollinators and wildlife), but are pathways to conversations surrounding land use, community health, and ethnology.
In service of this mission, we embrace the ethos of indigenous horticulture by utilizing natural and herbal pest maintenance practices on native plants. We also select plant species that are endemic to our land. Many of these species may have been prevalent at one time but are now absent -- and our work ensures their survival in the Catskill ecosystem, to rejuvenate the soil, feed our visitors, and heal our community for the next seven generations.
We have been certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a Community Wildlife Habitat, and we actively participate in programs run by the Garden Conservancy. For the future enjoyment of other visitors, please keep dogs and children out of the planting beds, and please don't pick the flowers or fruit without asking permission first.
Check out our Zine!
This is a guide to our garden like no other! The names of plants, herbs, berries, and trees with connections and significance to the Esopus Munsee Delaware are included with fabulous photos sourced by our intern Kai Meyer, who also did the design. The guide is a companion to our Self-Guided Sculpture Tour and allows you to see the garden from a new perspective. It is drawn from Evan Pritchard’s 2019 book “Herbs are Verbs.” Click the button or scan the QR code for your very own copy! A few hard copies are available for a $10 donation.
In Bloom Over the Years.
Here are short videos highlighting performances by some of the horticultural superstars featured at Brunel Sculpture Garden! We will be creating a self-guided garden tour brochure to serve as a companion piece to our sculpture guide. To help us cover the costs its production, click the Support the Garden button at the top of this page.
A video by McCadden of our Chojuraku peony in full bloom.
Watch the construction of our Pollinator Garden in the video below!
Visit us to explore more!
The sculptures photographed on our site are a small selection of the many extraordinary creations found on our blessed land. To experience the power of them all, plan your visit to Brunel Sculpture Garden today!
All original woodblock prints by Bianka Schneider