The stewards of the city’s parks have been partying an awful lot lately to engage a base of private support for public treasures that are indispensable to New Yorkers and its tourists.

Tonight, Laura Bush will be honored by the National Park Foundation. Mrs. Bush led the First Bloom initiative, a program aimed to expose children from urban areas to nature. In New York, a pilot city for the program, boys from the Boys’ Club of New York City and girls from the Lower East Side Girls Club learned about horticulture and designed a garden in the Battery.

Many park leaders — in other words, the people who run the parks day to day — will be in attendance. Some of them I photographed last week at the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy gala: the president and chief executive of the National Park Foundation, Vin Cipolla; the commissioner of the National Parks of New York Harbor, Maria Burks; a regional director of the National Park Service, Dennis Reidenbach, and the president of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, Leslie Koch.

Other parks parties on the horizon: The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy is having a fund-raiser next Thursday to support running a bar and restaurant on Pier 1, which has been a smash success this summer; the Prospect Park Ball is October 18, honoring the principal of the Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment, Veronica Peterson, and the Central Park Conservancy offers its famous Halloween costume contest and ball on October 28.