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.
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 relying on (whenever possible) the use of 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.
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 in Spring/Summer 2023 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!
Artic Kiwi Arbor & Pollinator Bed Around the Great White Spirit Totem
Emile Brunel’s extraordinary dream survives 100 years…
Brunel Park is a community-driven cultural center located on the former site of Emile Brunel’s home and Le Chalet Indien, a hotel opened by Brunel in 1921. Brunel was deeply enamored of Native American peoples and devoted half of his lifetime to constructing concrete expressionistic sculptures devoted to these indigenous communities.
The result is an extraordinary, surreal, and magical folk art environment that is currently listed in the National and State Register of Historic Places.
Today, these sculptures, built between 1921 and 1939 are still standing as a testament to the tangible and intangible cultural assets and practices of the Native American people of our region. The park hosts a plethora of native horticulture and serves as a tranquil, healing, inclusive and reflective space for visitors and residents.
Our immediate focus is on raising funds to replenish our financial stores to support new programs and ongoing maintenance of the ecosystem and garden they are inseparable from. If you are interested in supporting our mission, please click the button below.
Check out our press from Hudson Valley Almanac Weekly, our story of preserving Emile’s vision in Sunday Freeman, a fantastic article on Brunel’s story and property history in Ulster Magazine, and our Brunel Sculpture Garden – Folk Art Road Trips entry.
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