Southampton Rose Society Celebrates Harvey Feinstein

When soldier Harvey Feinstein was stationed in Germany, he carried a very important book with him whenever he had a furlough.

It was called “Art in the Western World,” an art history book he’d read during his undergraduate career at New York University. In 1958, before leaving for the Army, he had packed the 977 bound pages and made it his mission to see every sight he’d studied.

Nearly 40 years later, he finally did, not thanks to his time in the military, but instead to an unsuspecting hobby—gardening—that Mr. Feinstein left behind with his childhood in Brooklyn and picked back up only when he moved to the East End in 1965.

On Friday, May 18, the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons will honor Mr. Feinstein—garden connoisseur, artist, writer, former fashion designer, president emeritus of the Southampton Rose Society and community figure.

“It’s shocking, surprising. Obviously, I’m very pleased,” Mr. Feinstein said of the recognition while at his home in Peconic Landing, a retirement community in Greenport, on Thursday, May 3. “It’s a good honor. It encapsulates my whole history, my life on the South Fork and the things I did.”

It could be argued that Mr. Feinstein inherited his green thumb from his father, Josef, who got his son’s hands dirty at just 5 years of age in his two gardens at their home in Brooklyn. The gardens were planted with a fig tree, cherry tree and a rose arbor twisted with honeysuckles.

“I used to go out and help him in the garden, and I remember the three things he would say,” Mr. Feinstein recalled, noting that he grew up during the Great Depression. “‘Now that you’re helping me, don’t stomp on the rosebushes. Don’t pick the petals off the roses.’ And, ‘I think your mother wants you because I hear her calling.’”

He burst into laughter at the memory.

“Those gardens were beautiful on a summer night,” Mr. Feinstein mused. “The breeze would blow through and you could smell the roses and honeysuckles, and I guess it stuck.”

After his high school years—during which he explored art and writing—Mr. Feinstein attended college, where he studied retailing and art history, and then enlisted.

While abroad in Germany for two years, he began writing poetry.

“I don’t know why I started,” he said. “I met a girl in college and we were corresponding. I started sending her poems and she would send me poems, and it went on like that.”

Some of the poetry dripped with vibrantly visual and olfactory floral imagery, full of his passion for nature. A few lines from one poem, “Romance,” which is the introduction to his book of short stories and poems, “Pardon My Shorts,” reads: “Could I choose where to spend eternity/and searched my paths of memory/I’d pick a garden without hesitation/where we passed a morning/of calm delight and meditation/fragrant with acacia and pale tuberose/near a tumbling stream where wood fern grows.”

When he returned to America, Mr. Feinstein was on the prowl for a retailing job, but just couldn’t seem to find one. He needed a little help from his aunt—the woman responsible for turning him on to fashion.

“She worked for Saks Fifth Avenue, so that’s where she got me a job,” he said. “She was a very glamorous lady and when she was going into the market when it was market week, she would invite me to come along with her. She’d get tickets for the theater, take me out to dinner. I was usually her young escort and I thought it was a very glamorous business.”

It didn’t take long for him to learn that fashion was glamorous only on the runway, he said. He soon broke into the design world and worked his own hours, bouncing from client to client, which included L.L.Bean and J.Crew, among others.

To get his mind off clothes, Mr. Feinstein, who lived in Manhattan at the time, joined the pottery scene in Greenwich Village. His “post-Columbian” pieces, three birdhouses—an English birdhouse, “The Grange;” an American birdhouse, “Rose Cottage;” and a French birdhouse, “Le Moulin,” or “The Mill”—and “Bad Tom,” a naughty cat with a stray bird feather hanging from its mouth, are on display in his home, which is also decorated with his paintings.

“I tell people I used to be in fashion, and now I’m glad I’m out of fashion,” Mr. Feinstein said. “But it was a good business and allotted me opportunities to travel to Europe and to finally buy a house in Southampton. So that’s what I did.”

In 1965, he bought a 10-room home—with a big garden—on Old Town Crossing in Southampton and split his time between the East End and his Manhattan apartment.

Soon after he moved in, Mr. Feinstein’s friend—and former rosarian of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—Stephan Scanniello stopped by for a visit with nothing other than a rose bush.

“What do I do with this?” Mr. Feinstein said he’d asked Mr. Scanniello.

“Shove it in the ground and step back,” he’d replied.

“That rose bush was called, ‘New Dawn,’ and it grew 20 feet,” Mr. Feinstein said. “It was a climbing rose and I had to build a pergola to support it. I cut a rose from it and brought it in for the Southampton Rose Society’s annual Rose Show. I won a silver trophy for Best Climber, a first-class blue ribbon and a certificate of honor.”

Mr. Feinstein was hooked. He planted more than 145 rose bushes on his property and joined the Rose Society in 1985. Seven years later, he was elected president and joined the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons board of directors soon after.

“Harvey is a horticultural treasure,” Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons President Susan Kennedy Zeller wrote in an email last week. “His longtime interest and expertise in roses is well known, but is surpassed by his gregarious nature, willingness for travel, adventure and enjoyment in laughter with others. He makes a person want to pick up a trowel and sally forth in life!”

Under his leadership, the society gifted a rose garden to the Rogers Memorial Library, which is planted with 250 bushes. And once he moved to Peconic Landing in 2002, he asked to plant another rose garden. Without hesitation, the administration signed off on the project.

“They just had a big patch of grass between the library and the apartments,” Mr. Feinstein said during a tour of the community’s dining room and library, where he bumped into former Southampton Village Mayor Richard Spooner, also a resident. “It’s not like at Southampton, but it’s a nice garden that I take care of for them. It will be bursting into bloom in a little while.”

He longingly gazed out the window at the garden, that day shrouded by a misty rain.

“It looks pretty, doesn’t it?” he said. “Even in this weather. Yeah, it’s gonna be nice. So, there we are.”

He turned away and continued walking through the halls, casually greeting those he came across with a genuine smile. Many of his friends have also moved into the development, he said, and some have even witnessed Mr. Feinstein on his quest to see all that “Art in the Western World” had to offer.

Every September, for the last 19 years, Mr. Feinstein has organized a European getaway through the Rose Society to visit gardens and villas. He named the trip “Harvey’s Friends.”

“About four years ago, the last thing I had to see was a Greek ruin outside of Naples—the Basilica at Paestem,” he said. “With seeing this, I have seen everything in this book.”

Last fall, the group visited Biarritz, Toulouse and Paris in France. Mr. Feinstein said he is still trying to decide where to go this year.

“The first year, I traveled with 30 people. I’m still taking trips with some of those people who are still around,” he said. “A few of those people who came with me are now living here in Peconic Landing. It’s a continuation of an event. I must be doing something right.”

The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons will host its Garden Fair Preview Party honoring Harvey Feinstein on Friday, May 18, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Historical Society. Tickets start at $50. Reservations of $150 or more entitle two people to early admission at 5 p.m. For more information, call 537-2223 or visit hahgarden.com.