Garden and Home

Doug Tallamy, an entomologist, author, and professor at the University of Delaware, encourages homeowners to think about the role our yards play in the food chain that sustains birds and wildlife. The immense decline of the bird population by one-third over the past 50 years has opened eyes to its urgency.

Let us introduce you to the Landcraft Garden Foundation, the North Fork’s fraternal obverse to Jack Lenor Larsen’s LongHouse Reserve and a paradise that Dennis Schrader and Bill Smith have been building on the North Fork since 1992.

The gardens at Home, Sweet Home Museum were dedicated on Sept. 29, 2022, to Loretta Orion, who spent many years restoring and tending them. Ms. Orion, an anthropology professor, a French teacher, an author, a private duty nurse, a seamstress, and an etcher, died in July 2022 at the age of 77. The gardens are always on view for visitors at 14 James Lane.

A home vegetable gardener offers some hard won advice for getting the most out of your garden along with what grows best here.

The Star’s hunter-gatherer, Durell Godfrey, went looking for the kind of stuff that Mother Nature would be happy to use — and reuse whenever possible. She loves sustainability, and so will you. Shop locally and thoughtfully.

Frederico Azevedo has always been enamored with nature, flowers in particular. “As a child I would rearrange the plants for fun and plant the ingredients for my favorite foods,” he said. “The exciting thing about this medium is how it can make people happy and open up new parts of your life.” His business, Unlimited Earth Care in Bridgehampton, is celebrating a milestone this year.

. . . They’d ask for wallpaper, and they’d ask for Heather Dunn.

At first, I liked the bamboo. It was a comforting green wall, separating me from my neighbor’s pool. When the wind blew, it sounded like one hand clapping. At the same time, I found myself thinking, “If the revolution comes, I will dig a trench around my house and fill it with bamboo spears.”

The Traceys are embarking this season on an expansion that will see them transition from their previous location, a Peconic Land Trust plot of a little under an acre behind Balsam Farm in Amagansett, to a three-acre property on Montauk Highway that was known as Bhumi Farm for a couple of years.

Scott Bluedorn, an artist and activist living in Sag Harbor, is also an aficionado of vermiculture — a contained composting system in which earthworms break down food scraps to quickly create a mineral-rich soil amendment.

Perhaps making up for two years of lost time, the spring and summer of 2022 will be filled with marvelous workshops, lectures, and benefits here on the South Fork.

Rain gardens offer an opportunity to work with nature to restore balance, using the contours of the land to capture water that flows to lower elevations. The plants’ roots absorb rainwater and nitrogen runoff, while the soil filters particulates before they end up in our waterways. And rain gardens are also a way to ameliorate the dramatic loss of 3 billion birds in North America over the past 50 years.