Wanderlust in the park

All great cities have great parks, writes Dara Kell: spaces where you can exhale and slough off the stress and grime of urban life.

- NICOLENE LOUW

A walk in the park clears the mind and gives the eyes a break from concrete. Johannesburg has Zoo Lake, Cape Town has Kirstenbosch,

Copenhagen has Fælledparken and London has Hyde Park.

New York City – where I lived for 20 years – has more than 1700 parks! The two I visited most often were Central Park in Manhattan and the lesser-known Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were the architects of both parks, and it is said that they preferred Prospect Park, which they built second, over a period of 30 years between 1865 and 1895.

Central Park is slashed with roadways and encircled by skyscrapers. In Prospect Park, you’re more likely to forget that you’re in a city. At just over 2km² in size, it’s small – roughly half the size of Kirstenbosch – but there’s plenty to do: Prospect Park boasts an ice rink, a zoo, bike paths, botanical gardens and a concert amphitheatre with free music shows in the summer. But it also has pure, untrammelled wilderness, and that’s what I was after during the pandemic of 2020. Cooped up in my tiny apartment and unable to escape the city for the Adirondack Mountains to the north or the beaches to the south, I had to make do with what was right on my doorstep.

I decided to set myself a challenge of a “hike” in the park every day. The first thing I noticed was the birds. During my initial forest forays, on a woody bend next to a slow-moving river, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a flash of red, an electric figure against the deep green foliage. It was a northern cardinal, a male, showing off his bright red cape.