New York is all about secret sanctuaries and private oases. But I’d say Greenwich Village is Gotham’s land of clandestine gardens, a neighborhood of many lush green spaces behind 19th century buildings and churchyards.

To come across another of these secret gardens—a block from Washington Square Park no less, with a mystery bronze statue at the end of a wide concrete walkway—would be a delightful way to welcome spring.

Lucky for me, that’s what happened on a recent Saturday walk down lower Fifth Avenue.

Beyond a colonnade-style entrance between the former stables of Washington Mews and “The Row” of 1830s townhouses on Washington Square North, my eyes caught sight of a slender patch of green.

Though it’s not open to the public on weekends, I managed to get past the colonnade and down the path into the garden.

A canopy of pink and white petals overhead, patches of ivy crawling up walls, a couple of bird baths, bushes and flowers budding closer to the ground—it’s the kind of not overly manicured garden that reflects the Village’s historical refusal to adhere to convention (or the street grid).

Still, it’s not just an accidental, no-name garden. This is “Willy’s Garden,” on a slender stretch of New York University’s Greenwich Village campus.

According to the Park Odyssey blog, the 8,000 square foot garden—named for who exactly, no one seems to know—is landscaped by NYU and “functions as the entrance to the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and some faculty residences.”

All the garden’s greenery is part of a plan. “The garden was planted in zones: woodland, flowering meow, berry patch, and Three Sisters,” all species “collected by the Lenape peoples,” per the now defunct Local Ecologist website, via Park Odyssey.

The statue at the end has an appropriately cast-off history. It’s a bronze of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote—one of three replicas of an 1835 statue on display at the Palacio de las Cortes in Madrid.

In 1986, the mayor of Madrid presented the replica Cervantes to the city of New York, which placed it in Bryant Park. But when Bryant Park underwent a renovation in the late 1980s, the city donated it to NYU in 1989.

Its found a home in this easy-to-miss garden, which makes the most of its location on the lower Fifth Avenue of carriage houses and cobblestones.

Take a walk through it on a weekday. Unlike some of Greenwich Village’s other hidden gardens that lie behind fences and gates, it’s open to the public five days a week but feels like a private oasis.