Dan's Papers - August 15, 2008

Guild Hall presents its late summer garden program entitled "The Garden as As Art" next weekend, August 22 and 23. There's an opening cocktail party, lectures, and most importantly - the tour itself through magnificent gardens on the East End. As you wander through the gardens, you will find that the Museum has cast a broad net with the theme for this August, capturing more than the title claims in its garden tour offerings. The artist's garden, art in the garden and the art of gardening, and an exhibition at Longhouse Reserve of the container as art, accompany "The Garden as Art" in the landscape displays that await you.

If you begin in the west and head east, start with the Artist's Garden. Bob Dash's Madoo has been almost 40 years in the making. He has captured and mastered the Sagaponack landscape in his paintings and prints. But his garden expresses much more of his interior life than his artwork does. It is easy to observe his curiosity about and veneration of nature while admiring his pruning techniques or how he juxtaposes different forms of foliage. He has venerated a local weed, the Pawlonia, by applying the age-old method of coppicing to keep it a multi-stemmed shrub with enormous leaves. Aided by the world famous Sagaponack soil, although it was merely a tractor turnaround when he started, he has experimented endlessly with plant material, planting, pruning and caring for all of it with the assistance of Carlos, his devoted gardener. In many ways, the garden is a testament to the success of their relationship, but over the years it is evident that they have both grown and changed with the garden. This can easily be seen in the new turns and directions Dash's work has taken in the last decade, as he moved from painting the landscape to the individual flower, moving from representation to abstraction.

Intimate spaces tucked into a broad native landscape create an homage to nature, specifically the dunes and fields of the East End, await you at the second Sagaponack location. Subtle, attractive and inviting, the Potato Road residence is a recreation of an indigenous landscape. The Jaffe designed home was moved back from the primary dune and placed on a rise created by the dredging of the pond. From the path to the pool, the view across the field up to the house, backed by blue sky and clouds, is reminiscent of an Andrew Wyeth. Mercifully, the pool is hidden from the house. It's obscured by a gorgeous bank of Bayberry and sculpturesque Mugo Pines, which allows the eye to continue outward to the ocean. The contrast of the tawny native grasses against the green in the back of the house is striking is striking enough to convince you to give up your greensward. The garden begs the question, "Is the recreation of a natural landscape an art form equal to the design of the house?" Or, in this case, does it exceed it?

Sculptural trees are the entire landscape at the property off of Jericho Lane. A golden Hinoki Cypress by the front door looks like it was molded by the wind, though it may have been a parking incident. The Arcadian setting of the pool cools you down psychologically as you approach from across the lawn. Like a well-curated art show, specimen evergreens and beech trees, are well organized, so that even though each tree is magnificent in its own right, they don't compete with each other. Elegant and fascinating in its variety and texture, well tended and pruned to their best effect, there is a fortune in forms here that is serene year-round .

Heading east to Darby Lane, the secluded remnant of a colorful 90- year-old Italianate grotto is the back drop for a small sculpture park. Here, the classic and the modern convene. Caro's lime green 1960's metal work greets you at the gate and some Texan cows are sited between Jim Dine's columns with shovels and DeSuvero's barbed wire chairs. A riot of flowers surrounds the more modern Tuscan style house and drapes itself across the antique grotto. The high contrast of styles in the garden creates a lot of excitement, which is clearly a part of the owner's nature. Her own red tower rises on the north side of the house.

Three homeowners on Windmill Lane also generously opened up their properties to the tour and it is here that the art of gardening is so well realized in three different ways. Number 15 has a subtle sexiness that can be overlooked if you hurry through. Take a deep breath and relax, amble up to the magnolia out front and note how the bark matches the brick of the house behind it. Turn and start to look at all the tree trunks in the front lawn. Yes, there is a wonderful flowering tree collection here, but nothing will be in bloom when the tour passes through. This garden is a tribute to bark, trunks, lichens on stone and texture. In back of the house washed concrete planters have a wonderful skin of their own that is reflected in the small rectangular stone planters beneath them, which hold miniature alpines. It is the blueberries that preside over the garden here, but don't overlook the orchids in macramé hanging planters, the cordage of which complements the bark of the tree they are strung in. The rhubarb by the wood pile is the boldest thing in this garden. The owner once told me, while on a trip to the Netherlands, that she would never let a garden designer near her place, and clearly she did not need to, having a very personal aesthetic sensibility of her own.

A plant lover has tended number 23 for a long time. Moss, lichens and cheerful accident s are encouraged, but the fine-tuning of the tawny colors along the interior perennial bed, which match and complement the old brick, is masterful. A wormwood, the kind you can make absinthe from, stands alone near the knot garden and for good reason. Delight and shock occur in just the right amounts. Evidently the gardener has tried many things, plants and ideas out in these spaces, but none of it is unsettling. It shows how the art of gardening can be endlessly entertaining, as is the bottle tree.

Number 33 has a view that like all really good art, transports you to another place. In my case, it was to the dunes of Cape Cod, where we rambled growing up. But don't over look the stone work behind the house in favor of the beautiful dunes and sea. The combination of lavenders and stone in the descending path is gorgeous. Continue on to Skimhampton Road and Longhouse for more delights in the garden that will reveal not only their immediate elegance, but are also an attribute to the hands and minds that created the landscape.

I will save the rest of the tour for you to discover, whether it is the Skimhampton Road Road residence or the greater sculpture park that Longhouse has become.

For more than 20 years, April Gonzales has been involved in garden design, installation and maintenance on the East End, as well as specimen plant scouting and site supervision for landscape architects.