• Madison Cox Design

  127 W. 26th St., ninth fl., 212-242-4631

  It’s hard to keep a garden thriving here—winter winds, brutal summers, dirty air—but Madison Cox knows how to make our particular desert island bloom. Trained in environmental design at Parsons’ Paris branch, Cox works everywhere from Manhattan to Morocco and does high-profile jobs like Ian Schrager’s new Gramercy Hotel and the New York Botanical Garden. He also juggles smaller backyard and terrace projects, digging into every aspect, even the actual planting, himself. (One colleague describes his talent as “that inexplicable thing.”) He won’t even begin to make generalizations about prices, explaining that they vary too much from job to job, but he will delicately say “it’s more than one would think.” Howard Christian, of the Upper East Side garden store Treillage, puts it this way: “Somebody who bought a $15 million penthouse would hire Madison Cox.” Then again, if your garden’s green enough, who needs a weekend house?

From the 2006 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine