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.