Opinion: A Tour of Garden Tours-de-Force

By Abby Jane Brody

Visiting gardens has become a basic fact of the gardener's life, especially on the South Fork, over the last 20 years or more.

Last weekend a generous shaking of fairy dust was sprinkled over Guild Hall's Artists' Gardens Tour, and it left both the artist-gardeners and their visitors grinning with delight. By the end of Saturday I could only picture the bumblebees on my hydrangea flowers, so drunk with nectar at the end of the day that it is hard to tell if they are dead or just dead drunk.

What was the magic ingredient? We were in search of garden trends specific to the South Fork. What exactly is the legacy of garden-making on the South Fork? Visiting the Guild Hall exhibit and companion book, "Hamptons Gardens: A 350-Year Legacy," left me with more questions than answers.

The answers became apparent from the moment on Friday evening when we stepped into the magic of the garden of Barbara and Richard Lane in Sagaponack and completed our tour Saturday afternoon at the Spizzirri-Fensterer garden in Georgica, our visual faculties dazzled, overwhelmed.

Oh Lord, give me a meadow like Alexandra Munroe and Robert Rosenkranz's. Please, may I have a few more acres and the help of Gerson Leiber to create an elegant, complex series of hedges? No? His painting "Lightless Garden" would do.

First was the light, the water, the landscape. Then came the artists, followed by the moguls for whom a trophy garden was a basic necessity of summer life. The cycle has repeated itself through the decades from the late-19th century until the present.

We've been fortunate that a string of uniquely talented garden-makers and artists have settled here. The romantic pictures of Thomas Moran and Childe Hassam informed my earliest ideas of what a garden should be. I still wait to be invited to a nighttime garden party lighted only by hanging paper lanterns, just as Hassam painted his wife Maude in "July Night," unfortunately not included in the exhibit.

Mrs. Lorenzo Woodhouse's water garden, created in 1901, was a tour de force. The garden itself has mostly reverted to a briar-filled jungle. However, its wandering waterways, Japanese bridges and teahouses, and sheets of iris have been preserved for our delectation in the paintings of Hassam and others.

Alfonso Ossorio was another staggering talent, arriving a half-century later. He took the 57-acre garden The Creeks, directly across Georgica Pond from the ocean, and transformed it from Adele and Albert Herter's vast flower garden tended by an army of Japanese gardeners into his most inspired, modernist work of art. His materials were rare conifers in shades of yellow, blue, and green. (The color in the photographs of the Ossorio garden is completely off; the yellows were a fresh yellow, not bilious gold.)

The garden of Costantino Nivola in Springs remains the home of his wife, Ruth, and grandson Adrian. Visiting the garden on Saturday, it was easy to envision him making sand castles at the beach with his grandchildren, returning to the studio to create abstract sand castings.

A concrete head Mr. Nivola made of his grandson Adrian as a baby is set on the grass near a pergola. There is an area to cook out of doors and to eat, an old grape arbor, concrete walls that perhaps reminded him of his native Sardinia, a fountain he made in front of a wall with a mural painted on it, and bits and pieces of his work found here and there. What remains is a picture of family life during the summer in a simpler, richer time.

Sharing memories and stories with the generous creators of these gardens made the visits very personal. The legacy of gardens here is the ability of the artists to actualize and share their own uniquely personal visions of what a garden is.