Recent Stories: Garden

Is it possible that some people who regularly visit the South Fork are unaware that the Parrish Art Museum has relocated to Water Mill on the site of an old nursery? Not likely.

Still, in the mostly effusive reception the Herzog and de Meuron building has received in the regional, national, and international press since it opened in November, the 15-acre property on which the building sits, designed by Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts, has been largely overlooked.

   All agree that no garden is complete without still or moving water, but lack there still will be without a forest no matter how bijou. Call it copse or spinney or bosque, just so long as it is definitely a wood. The reasons are many and obvious. No gazebo or ramada nor certainly an umbrella is ever equal to its shade, which is always moving. None of them can equal the coolness they present nor the odors of a patch of woods, nor the quickness of squirrels, chipmunks, birds in general and mourning doves and woodpeckers in particular.

   Catalogs suffocate in the post office box and mulch the desk. They are in full spate now like melt in spring thaw, an avalanche without end, roaring like a waterfall, often coming in threes and twos, marked either to “resident” or less vaguely to your neighbor, and write to them as you might to be less generous in the supply, they still relentlessly arrive, the result of having ordered a single package of seeds years ago.

   Nothing crisps the heart of a gardener with greater fury than a low shadowed, endless winter afternoon, windless, throbbingly cold and soundless, lonelier than the end of love. Hopeless endless, but then he opens the pages of a precocious seed catalog, and then the timeless dream forms again and he is turning the earth, inhaling its unlocking odors as if a book of secrets, hoeing, pushing, copping, making a fine, pouring, friable tilt. One is straight out of an old woodcut, better shoes, perhaps, but equally mired, the tool much the same, the back similarly bent.

   With the last of the bulbs in the ground and garlic, too, digging is over for the year and I do already miss it: Digging is what the garden is all about. Holes large and small are fundamental to its structure, essential to its openly agreeable accomplishments.

   Putting the garden to bed is the major activity of the late-autumn garden calendar. Or was. At one time it was the most demanding, the most scrupulous and sensuous of moments. Think parti-colored leaves raked into great conical Egyptian piles of most fragrant odors, set to fire under blest November skies. All the clipping-down and raking, tidying the great strewn wig of growth to coherent plots, borders, edges neat of weeds, the party definitely over, the table swept, chairs just so, readied for another event but one far in the future.

   Out here, the month of October offers two gifts, the one dubious, the other problematic. Around the 23rd of the month we may expect the first killing frost, the black one, 32 degrees and lower, for several hours, enough for crystals of ice to form and rupture the tender cells of stalk and leafage, to melt the morning following, bringing an unattractive dose of the stricken and dead. On days that follow, if the weather be benignly warm (70, please), we may enter the true, the only, the marvelous time of Indian summer.

   I once knew a woman who lived in a tree. Or just about. Nearly. The house she inherited was beneath a trophy silver maple, the largest such in the entire state, as a matter of fact, dwarfing an otherwise impressive two-story shingled charmer of decent vintage in every way it is possible to dominate, engulf, rule and dwindle the resources of a domicile, and the silence, of course, was stupendous. The light, on the other hand, through each and every window, was unrelenting tree-light, slow movements of varying shadows with, very occasionally, a freckle or two of sunshine.

    On Saturday, Guild Hall will hold its annual Garden as Art tour featuring five gardens around the South Fork. Tomorrow there will be a cocktail reception for patrons at Windy Dune, Lucy and Steve Cookson’s estate in the Devon Colony in Amagansett.
    Saturday begins with a continental breakfast and lecture by Edmund Hollander, who will sign copies of “The Private Oasis.” The new book on garden design, written with Maryanne Connelly and Philip Langdon, focuses on the built elements of the garden.

   I do not pick flowers. Unless they are downed by storm or ordinary garden maintenance, not ever. In those infrequent times they will be snipped from stem or branch and floated in a suitable bowl, a most delicate way to admire a bloom or two, a display the Orient arrived at many centuries ago.

   Centuries ago there was tulipomania. More recently and on a larger stage, there was the dot-com bubble, followed by the housing bubble. We know what happened to them.
    Gardeners now seem caught up in a hydrangea frenzy. There are mopheads, lacecaps, and Annabelle types, not to mention oakleaf and Japanese panicle hydrangeas. For the truly smitten, there are Japanese mountain hydrangeas (serrata), villosas, and other more tender species and varieties.

   In today’s popular culture the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity at all.
That has been the fate of deutzias, June-flowering shrubs related to mock orange. Both members of the Saxifragaceae family seem to be hopelessly out of fashion, and undeservedly so.