Westchester County, New York is located in southern New York, sharing its southern boundary with New York City and its northern border with Putnam County. It is bordered on the west side by the Hudson River and on the east side by the Long Island Sound and Fairfield County, Connecticut. The county has a total area of 500 square miles (1,300 km2), of which 430 square miles (1,100 km2) is land and 69 square miles (180 km2) (14%) is water. It is an area rich in biodiversity with many parks and preserves. Literary environmental writer Alex Shoumatoff hailed Westchester County as the "most richly diversified deciduous forest in the world" in a 1978 The New Yorker profile, at the time estimating that it contained 4,200 species of plants.