In East Hampton, some of our most beautiful outdoor public spaces were once private gardens and residences. The East Hampton Nature Trail is one good example, but many other such sites dot our fair town.
You may not know what a hemerocallis is, but the garden adjacent to Clinton Academy once bore the name. This photo, from The East Hampton Star archive, shows the gate to the garden some two decades after its establishment in 1941.
Hemerocallis is the Latin name given to daylilies, which were a passion of Martha Howard Prentice Strong (1851-1949), a dedicated member of the Garden Club of East Hampton and lifelong lover of plants. Martha, along with her husband, Theron George Strong (1846-1924), kept a sweeping East Hampton estate in the dunes overlooking the Atlantic they called “The Dolphins.” There, despite being told that the land was unproductive, Martha established an extensive garden, including countless varieties of daylilies.
Her interest in these plants was sparked by an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, where she was a member of the advisory council and where the daylily creations of Dr. Arlow Burdette Stout were on display. Stout was the director of laboratories at the garden. Back at her estate, she spent from 1929 to 1941 cultivating more than a hundred types of daylily, and in 1941 she donated the entire collection to Clinton Academy, where the flowers were planted alongside violets, ferns, and trees.
By 1987, the garden was in poor condition, overshadowed by a tree planted there in 1972. As a result, the garden was redesigned around native plant species and replanted in 1989 by Calista Washburn. In 2003, the garden was redesigned once more, becoming the Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden, which it still is today.
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Julia Tyson is a librarian and archivist in the Long Island Collection.
