Celebrity Love Letters to Their Favorite Parks

City parks are a balm. They are places for reflection, respite, and rest; they are accessible to all. They are places for us urban folk to be alone, together. In the new book City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts, Catie Marron collects intimate essays on 21 great parks in cities around the world, all accompanied by generous, gorgeous portraits of those parks by the photographer Oberto Gili.

Marron, a writer and former chair of the New York Public Library, chose green spaces she loved and knew well—the High Line in Manhattan, D.C.’s Dumbarton Oaks, the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris—and also those that, to her, were intriguing strangers—the Maidan in Calcutta, Maruyama Koen in Kyoto, Cairo’s al-Azhar. Many are beautiful and tranquil in the way you expect city parks to be. Some, like the Maidan, are less so. Despite this, even the uglier ducklings are necessary parks—and perhaps precisely because of their shortcomings, even more so.