In the Victorian-era school of thought known as “the Language of Flowers,” wisteria is associated with romance, beauty, and devotion, with a slightly ominous postscript referencing the plant’s twisting vines and warning of loving something a little too much, lest it be suffocated.

Concerned Citizens of Montauk is urging home gardeners and professional landscapers alike to stop adding synthetic fertilizer on their lawns, flower beds, and vegetable gardens.

If you have explored natural approaches to gardening, you may have heard of biodynamics. Depending on how it’s described, it can sound either mystical or based on ancient farming wisdom.

There it was: the moment the Garden Book editor became a gardener herself.

“All gardens are a form of autobiography,” said the late, great Bob Dash, who began ‘writing’ his own into the soil of Sagaponack in 1967 — a story those at the Madoo Conservancy have continued in the dozen years since Dash’s death and the four decades the public has been welcomed into his two-acre botanical sanctuary.

Floral arranging and gardening have been Lilee Fell’s synergistic passions since childhood. As the owner of Lilee Fell Flowers in Sag Harbor, she grew up watching her mother create floral arrangements for garden club flower shows and her grandmother making arrangements for their church’s altar guild.

Helen S. Rattray, the longtime editor and publisher of The East Hampton Star, died early Wednesday morning at Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport.

Paid Notice: Born June 28th, 1927, in Canandaigua, N.Y. in the home city of her maternal grandparents. Her mother had moved home temporarily needing help with two older daughters while her father stayed in Ithaca, N.Y., for work.

Paid Notice: Marion Louise Dailey of Stamford, Conn., passed away peacefully in her home on April 9, 2025.

Paid Notice: It is with deep sorrow that we announce that Sean Michael Mendillo, 49, passed away at his home in Lake George, N.Y., on April 2, 2025. Sean was a loving father, son, brother, cousin and friend who will be deeply missed by his extended family and friends.

Two themes were apparent when over half a dozen people turned up at an East Hampton Town Board meeting this week: consternation that the town would soon settle a lawsuit brought after the board attempted to close the airport in 2022 and immediately reopen it with restrictions, and threats that a settlement would ultimately hurt the board members at the ballot box.

The more than 70 East Hampton students taking part in a three-year science research program that allows them to perform and investigate their own research topics, working with professional mentors in their field of study presented their work at a symposium earlier this month.

Stepping into the new Sagaponack General Store, which reopened yesterday after being closed since 2020, is a sweet experience, and not just because there’s a soft-serve ice cream station on the left and what promises to be the biggest penny candy selection on the South Fork on your right, but because it’s like seeing an old friend who, after some struggle, made it big. Really, really big.

East Hampton Town and the Maidstone Gun Club in Wainscott, which has been shuttered since August 2022, may be close to renewing a lease for the 97-acre property despite litigation brought by several residents who say that errant bullets fired from the private club have hit their houses, posing a threat to their very lives.

When Superstorm Sandy roared across the South Fork the distinctive weathervane atop the Amagansett School — in the shape of a sailboat with sea gulls flying fore and aft — was one small casualty. Bob Linker of the Irony has not only restored the weathervane, but made sure it will work properly for the first time.

Has a shocking crime that took place in East Hampton Village in 1955 finally been solved? Mayor Jerry Larsen believes it has, and he isn’t alone.

A massive die-off of honeybees this winter marks “the first time in history that professionals lost more bees than hobbyists,” one beekeeper said. Bee experts are working to identify the cause of unprecedented losses that will be the biggest to hit honeybee colonies in U.S. history.

Last winter and the one just passed have proved less daunting for some here than in the past thanks to the presence of the Hamptons Run Club, which is overseen by Edwin Garcia, a Montauk personal trainer.

Anyone who has played a racket sport — tennis, platform tennis, squash, racquetball, pickleball — will be able to pick up padel readily, and it’s popularity is surging.

Several East Hampton Town Trustees have questioned the expansion of an oyster restoration effort and an accompanying reef in Georgica Pond, as requested by Stony Brook University scientists. “I don’t want to be a board that drastically changed that entire closed ecosystem,” the presiding officer said.