This excerpt comes from Diana Balmori's A Landscape Manifesto. Balmori Associates, her landscape and urban design firm, recently completed a nine-mile linear park on the abandoned New Haven railroad in Connecticut. READ MORE

New York City's greatest administrator, Parks & Rec Commish Adrian Benepe, has folded or wadded in the face of the bizarre Coney Island toilet-paper rationing disaster. (Workers or their superiors took it upon themselves to ration out toilet-paper.) Today Benepe comes out swinging: "It's our business to help New Yorkers do theirs." THAT'S GOOD STUFF. As we have noted before at length, Benepe is responsible for much of the recent beautification of New York City. For instance, did you go down to the Hudson last night for the fireworks? (Surely you did, because apparently everyone was there, it looked like Cloverfield on the way home, with people scrambling over barricades on the closed-off West Side Highway.) Perhaps you passed a bucolic, flower-crammed scene such as this one, spotted in the low west 90s. You can thank Adrian Benepe! No, go on, you selfish schmuck, thank him.

You can see all sorts of things today for the first time on the new upper stretch of the High Line, which runs from 20th to 30th streets—from a great view into Marianne Boesky's Deborah Berke-designed house/gallery to children frolicking to some very good-looking people. Also, a top-notch plant. Also! The best (aka "fastest") place to get your car inspected in New York City: right at the corner of 10th Avenue and 26th Street. (Also a scary art installation below.) Spotted last night: people actually eating berries off bushes. I hope they feel okay today? READ MORE

Have you been outside? Sure you have—gotta go buy Wheat Thins and cigarettes sometime. But have you really been outside? These in particular are the short weeks that genius NYC Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe has set up to make New York City a ridiculous and tawdry explosion of plant reproductive techniques. Central Park—where that delicious little bit of forest above is—is like a tree orgy; it's sort of embarrassing! And elsewhere around the city, it's a testament to the City's impressive investment to intelligent planting and plant care. Sure, the argument could be made that it just gives the homeless somewhere nicer to sleep, or it makes a nice backdrop for brown people to be searched illegally, but don't you also believe in a beautiful city? And for the class-conscious record, if you haven't been all the way uptown yet, those tulips on the avenues certainly go up to at least 168th Street. READ MORE

The High Line park, ten years in the making, officially opened yesterday. What's striking on the High Line, apart from its delightfully uneven poured walkways (the arguments and code-wrangling there must have been!) and benches on wheels, is what you can see not on but from the narrow strip of railway. It presents an idealized, bizarre version of New York City, a west side skyline you haven't seen before. Disorienting! Where are we? READ MORE

Attention New York City cat lovers! There are at least three little round beds of catmint growing in Stuyvesant Square Park, at East 16th Street and Second Avenue, tucked just behind the gates on the west side of Second Avenue, right where you enter from the crosswalk. (The park across from Friends School, where Julianne Moore is dropping off her children now, not the park across from Beth Israel, where Jews are convalescing.) The plant looks like mint, obviously, and grows in a circle with a little hole in the middle. Bring a leaf home to your cat friend today, he will thank you with insanity and perhaps violence.