(06/10/2009) Fusing a relatively newfound passion for gardening
 Durell Godfrey
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with a longstanding flair for design, Dianne Benson launched her own Web site, DianneBBest.com, on May 22.
“I decided to take what I thought were the most beautiful and honest tools and sell them from my Web site,” she explained. The name of her company is the Best @Dianne B: Ten Garden Greats.
Ms. Benson said that the site is “very particular. Each page was designed like a piece of art.” Each of 10 basic gardening tools or accouterments is shown in color and described in detail: gloves, a trowel, a shovel, a pruning tool, small clippers, a tool belt, a yard bag, labels and markers, rubber shoes, and green gardening twine.
“I think plants in a garden know they’re in a garden; I think there’s a communion,” Ms. Benson said.
She was in the retail fashion business for many years as the owner of the Dianne B. stores and the first Comme des Garcons shops in this country. She imported Issey Miyake and Jean Paul Gaultier’s lines while designing her own collection, and collaborated not only with designers but with artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and Peter Hujar.
Ms. Benson has been a gardener since 1986, when she owned a house on Baiting Hollow Road in East Hampton. It was the first time, she said, that she “looked at a piece of property and thought, ‘Oh, gardening.’ ” Spring came and she saw flowers and flowering trees. “So I said, well, I want some tulips. I became obsessed with turning this tangly acre into a garden.”
About eight years later, she “got totally fed up with the fashion business and never wanted to leave East Hampton.” She realized that the “last thing I would want at this point in my life is a store with four walls.”
While on a garden tour, Ms. Benson decided she was going to write a book, “because I couldn’t find a book that wasn’t about a garden that was totally unobtainable, or it was too botanical.”
“Dirt: The Lowdown on Growing a Garden With Style” is the account of making her first East Hampton garden. “I’m a real gardener who really plants and really digs,” she said. Now living on David’s Lane in East Hampton, Ms. Benson is writing a second book, “Dirtier.”
She also writes the gardening column for Hamptons Cottages and Gardens magazine and is a co-president of the LongHouse Reserve, a 16-acre sculpture and flower garden, learning center, and arboretum in East Hampton.
On the Web site Ms. Benson describes the items in a personal way. It is, she said, “less about the words than about the thing.”
The trowel is made in Montezuma, Iowa, of stainless steel. Rust-proof and waterproof, it has a depth gauge to help people plant bulbs. The gloves manage to protect the fingers without inhibiting dexterity. The yard bag, into which the gardener can put pulled weeds and other detritus, will lie flat in folds or stay open even with almost nothing in it to weigh it down.
Ms. Benson found the clippers in Japan 20 years ago and tracked them down again recently. The Felco pruner comes in two models, one of them especially suited to left-handed gardeners.
In addition, there is a belt in which to carry the Japanese clippers, Felco pruning shears, and pencils to mark the plant labels she also sells on the site. Ms. Benson designed a belt made of the same leather used on the handles and trim of Vuitton bags.
The shovel is the most expensive item. Ms. Benson found a farmer in Idaho who makes them one at a time from stainless steel and with ash-wood handles imported from a man in Hope, Ark. The buyer’s name and the year of purchase can be hand-stamped onto the metal for an additional $20.
The gardening shoe and boot are both made in France. The shoe is a rubber loafer and the boot is available in a panther print or olive green.
Developed in England in 2002, the twine comes wrapped or twirled in a mesh bag. It can be used to tie a grapevine to an arbor or a rose to a fence and is frost-proof, reusable, and stretches as the plant grows.
In addition to the exigencies of her large garden, planted on the perimeter of her property, and her LongHouse duties, Ms. Benson is also a founding member of the board of Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. She and her partner, Lys Marigold, also travel frequently with their teenage daughter.