“The tulips are up. The daffodils are still up. The fishpond looks gorgeous. There are grape hyacinths and bleeding hearts. The irises are coming on,” said longtime Village resident Elizabeth Gilmore while standing in the Jefferson Market Garden.

The garden – named for Thomas Jefferson, himself a gardener – occupies .361 acres along Greenwich Avenue between Sixth Avenue and W. 10th Street. Lying next to the Victorian Gothic building, the former courthouse that became Jefferson Market Library, is “the most beautiful gem of a garden open to the public,” said Ms. Gilmore. “It’s a community garden in a park starved neighborhood in the heart of Greenwich Village. We have very limited green open space here.”

She is among those helping with the 30th anniversary celebration benefit tonight for the Jefferson Market Garden, the former site of the Women’s House of Detention. After that building was torn down in 1973, the Board of Estimate transferred the parcel to the Parks Department the following year, and the community-based Jefferson Market Garden Committee Inc. was entrusted with its care.

The garden was designed under the direction of landscape architect Pamela Berdan, who was inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Central Park. In 1998 Brooke Astor dedicated a new decorative fence, which contained elements of the original courthouse fence.

In 1999, horticulturalist Susan Sipos began a gradual redesign and refurbishment of the garden. “When they took out the Women’s House of Detention, they put the rubble into the foundation and basement,” Ms. Sipos said. “My first task was to put in as much compost and soil as possible and take out construction debris and ivy.”

Ms. Sipos wanted the center of the garden to be a calm green space. “I didn’t want the visitor to be distracted. I wanted the view to unfold as the visitor would walk through the garden.” She removed a ring of fairy roses, opened the tree canopy, and enhanced the planting beds to display the changing color and texture of the seasons.

“To me, personally, as someone who loves gardening, the garden educates and informs me,” said the vice president of development at the Battery Conservancy, Milena Herring, a West Village resident for the past 22 years. “For instance, when I need something for my own garden that thrives in the shade, I’ll go to see what Susan has planted that’s doing well in the shade.”

Ms. Sipos said she learned most of her gardening principles from her grandmother, who was an avid gardener in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Asked to name one, Ms. Sipos said, “Listen to and watch the plants, and they’ll tell you what they need.”

Visual artist Su-Jung Lee, a West Village resident and member of the benefit committee, praised horticulturalist Sipos and the team of volunteers for keeping the garden open six days a week. “It’s a place to be quiet, a place to be surprised, a place to connect to greenery and to nature,” Ms. Sipos said.

“It’s a jewel. It’s an elegant place,” said Ruth Sprute, who has been a Village resident since 1948 and helps occasionally with the gardening.

Ms. Sprute assisted the Greenwich Village Association, led by Margot Gayle and Verna Small, when it campaigned to save the courthouse building next door, which was going to be auctioned off in 1959. They also saved the clock tower in 1961, and a year later Mayor Wagner established the building as a branch library.

Parks and recreation commissioner Adrian Benepe and Central Park Conservancy founder Elizabeth Barlow Rogers will co-chair the benefit tonight. Committee members include New School University president Robert Kerry, director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, Kent Barwick, and several officials – including Speaker Gifford Miller, Council members Alan Gerson and Christine Quinn, State Senator Thomas Duane, and Assemblywoman Deborah Glick.

The event begins tonight in the garden at 5 p.m. before moving to 24 Fifth Avenue for a reception. Lynden Miller will receive the Brooke Astor Award for Outstanding Contributions to Urban Gardens, for her work in turning neglected park sites and empty lots into beautiful gardens. “I think she changed the way people look at public spaces,” said Ms. Sipos, describing Ms. Miller’s achievements. Ms. Miller is also known for creating the Daffodil Project, that has annually planted more than 2 million daffodils around the city since the attacks of September 11.

The Jefferson Market Garden is closed Mondays but open six days a week from noon to 6 or 7 p.m. depending on the weather. Come have a look yourself.

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PROFESSORIAL CHAIR?

Friends, alumni, and colleagues gathered Thursday to recall the life of Charles DeCarlo, who served as president of Sarah Lawrence College from 1969 to 1981. Prior to his years at the college, DeCarlo worked at IBM, where he played a key role in the development and widespread application of computer technologies for business and education.

Sarah Lawrence College dean Barbara Kaplan recalled a humorous anecdote about DeCarlo’s desk chair. “It came, I believe, from IBM. But somehow, once it was at Sarah Lawrence, it broke, and the result was a chair that perpetually leaned backwards. This bothered Charles not at all – he was happy as a clam sitting in it, totally comfortable. But when any other person sat in it, it would topple over, dumping the would-be occupant unceremoniously on the floor. And that was, in its own way, symbolic of Charles: completely comfortable with precarious situations that would drive other people to distraction.”

Daughter Elisa DeCarlo said her father was quoted in the press as saying “grades don’t matter” – in keeping with the college’s vaunted ethos of experimental pedagogy. But then he’d go ballistic, she said, when she came home from school with a C- in math.