Around The Garden

SHERIDAN SANSEGUNDO

It may be the end of September, but at Grey Gardens, that mythical house in East Hampton, the gardens are a wild fizz of color cascading over old walls, spilling from wide perennial borders, and weighing down arches and pergolas. It's as if someone had dropped a floral Alka-Seltzer in a glass of hazy green water.

The atmosphere is very strong - an air of slightly old-fashioned lushness teetering on the brink of anarchy - and as you step through each arch or doorway half-hidden in ivy or clematis there is just a tingle of apprehension about what lies ahead.

It's perfect - just what you'd expect to find in the garden of the eccentric Edie Beale and her daughter, Little Edie, and their dozens upon dozens of cats.

The Magician

In fact, though, the house had to be stripped to its bones when Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn bought it a decade ago, and nothing remained of any garden except a few old walls. Indeed, it's doubtful if the garden ever looked this good even in its heyday.

It's as if someone had dropped a floral Alka-Seltzer in a glass of hazy green water.

The magician who has reimagined it is Victoria Fensterer, a landscape designer who, apart from her horticultural and planning skills, has a way with atmosphere.

From the driveway, you step through a gate into an herb and vegetable garden nestled against the side of the house, enclosed on three sides by a 15-foot-high privet hedge. From this warm and protected spot, where basil grows thigh-high and tomatoes swell like melons, three narrow openings give enticing glimpses of the main garden beyond.

Peaks In August

The one we take leads along a path of worn river stones under a canopy of tree hydrangeas and curly willow to a slate-gray swimming pool.

While the garden is planned to be at its peak in August, when Mr. and Mrs. Bradlee are usually in East Hampton (Frances Hayward is the fortunate tenant for the rest of the year), that doesn't mean it lacks interest in the other months.

Spring's irises give way to peach, apricot, and melon daylilies, which in turn yield to blue hydrangeas, white tiger lilies, white rose of Sharon, and pink oleanders.

Light And Gauzy

Two weeks ago, the garden's deep and extravagant perennial beds had a splendid display of the soft rosy-purple panicles of lespedeza, downy lavender thalictrum, nepeta, seaside-loving statice in pastel tones, Fairy roses, Russian sage, white and mauve bells of platycodon, and an airy veil of pink, rose, raspberry, and white Japanese anemones.

The perennial beds have a light, feathery air about them - no neatnik, orderly blocks of color or rigid shapes here.

At the foot of the pool, a grass path leads to a minuscule thatched cottage, complete with a tiny picket-fenced garden laden with gauzy plantings of pink meadowrue Thalictrum aquilegifolium, astilbes, peach-pink meadowsweet Filipendula rubra, hostas with pale lavender flowers, and the delicate spears of plume poppies, Macleaya cordata.

Alice's Cottage?

The cottage, with Ramona and Jackmanii clematis and Betty Prior and Seafoam roses climbing over its roof, is just large enough for a chair and a small table on which to write a letter to a lover pining in the wastes of Patagonia. It stands in the shadow of a splendid mimosa tree and a few imposing conifers, which emphasize the Alice-in-Wonderland scale.

Your foot strikes stone, and looking down you see a small memorial: "Spot Beale, A Dog. A nobler gentleman never lived. Beloved by all who knew him. Died May 29, 1942."

To the left of the pool, trees hide a tennis court. To the right is the house, whose wide verandas, porches, and French doors focus on summer, a time when the gray shingles and soft gray-green paint are set off on two sides by a lacy sea of Tardiva hydrangeas.

The living room looks out onto a walled garden, reached by a grass path through deep flower beds. But it is more exciting to enter through one of two arched doors in the old stone wall - one buried in ivy and autumn clematis and the other in clematis Montana Rubens, which must be glorious in early summer.

Through The Arch

As you duck under the doorway you find yourself in a hidden garden.

There's an apple tree in each corner, a rose-covered pergola against the rear wall, and, in the center, two chairs on a dinner plate of grass almost lost in a ring of gooseneck loosestrife, exuberant purple caryopteris, feathery white plumes of Artemisia lactiflora, Japanese anemones, and fall sedums, anchored by a few tree hydrangeas.

Lo, It Was So

It was first planted as a big circular bed of flowers.

"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice to be in the center of that,' " said Ms.

Fensterer.

And, lo, it was so. So now you can sit enclosed in a ring of flowers in a walled garden which is, in its turn, enclosed by the larger garden, with sulphur yellows flitting around your head and the sound of the ocean in the background.

Who could ask for anything more?

And if there are ghost cats rolling in the catmint, and you imagine a movement at an attic window, then so much the better.