Overcoming problem areas in the garden

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There is so much more to horticulture and landscape design than just planting pretty flowers, as anyone in the business knows.

A quick tour of two of Tony Piazza’s landscape design projects reveals a strong capacity for innovative design solutions for areas that have difficult hydrological requirements.

Too often, drainage is over-engineered and under-designed, but this is a critical part of landscape design that has to be addressed from the beginning of a project.

In the final result of two of his installations, Mr. Piazza and his team at Southampton-based Piazza Horticultural Group have glorified a freshwater marsh on one property, incorporating it into a gorgeous sculpture park; and molded the land on another project in an area with a high water table that has kept the lawn from turning into an anaerobic swamp.

Resolving the water rise, flow and drainage issues on both of these challenging sites, Mr. Piazza has turned mud, clay and marsh into gold, so to speak. In the matter of drainage, he is very au courant.

Marshes historically have been filled in instead of incorporated into landscape design—after all, that is how both Venice and Boston expanded, not to mention the marshes of New Jersey and the southern tip of Manhattan. But the tide is turning in terms of understanding the life cycle of marshes.

These morasses are veritable marine nurseries and bio-filters all in one. The current trend in landscape architecture is turning away from building fields of dry wells as an answer to water flow across a property and toward actively reconstructing marshes and freshwater wetlands.

East Hampton project

In his work, Mr. Piazza is slightly ahead of the curve. As an example, one of his projects in East Hampton—a freshwater marsh that was a buffer between an adjoining large pond and the formal park-like landscape which was built to showcase outdoor sculpture—eventually became the focus of the owner’s affection, with Mr. Piazza’s guidance.

“I buy him pounds and pounds of duck weed and he spends his weekends sprinkling it over the surface of the water,” Mr. Piazza reported in a recent interview.

At that particular property, the horticulturist began by experimenting with a lot of water-loving plants in the adjacent upland area where the water levels can rise dramatically beyond the pond and marsh’s normal boundaries. Some thrived, some drowned, but over the years, lush riparian banks of swamp azalea, iris and rush foliage were complemented by other bold water-loving plants. And that is how Mr. Piazza began to construct a bridge between what was once a wild bog and is now a treasured agrarian landscape that complements the civilized lawn and sculpture park.

Since water levels really do fluctuate over the course of the seasons, this wetland can also be just an expanse of mud. But the marsh’s rhythm and water flow holds a lot of visual and ecological interest. The vertical punctuation of the pepperidge tree trunks that emerge from the water seems to have been repeated in the broader upland areas of the landscape where trunks of oaks rise out of the lawn in the same cadence.

Mr. Piazza has repeated the intertwining of the native marsh foliage in the banks of shrubs, grasses and perennials in the adjacent gardens very much like an homage to a favored artist. Reflections of clouds, sky, overhead branches of the pepperidges and sword-like fronds of iris in the patches of water can mesmerize, as can the swirling patterns of duck weed. In the fall, the brilliant red of the pepperidge carpets the walkways and allows more light into what was a shady area full of bulbs in spring and bold foliage in summer.

The view over the marsh from an existing large arbor is framed in part by a screen of old wisteria trunks that weave upward like a wooden lace curtain, allowing light in and a framed view out over the wetland as if it were another piece of artwork, an ever changing tableau. Below the arbor, the owner had Mr. Piazza create a tiered series of landwaves that contrast with the stillness of the wetland pools.

Wainscott project

At a second property, located in Wainscott, Mr. Piazza has artfully navigated the converse situation, where new home construction in a low-lying area near the beach revealed a high water table and a layer of dense marine clay that meant water could sit where it was not wanted, creating a swamp that could easily go stagnant, particularly after having been run over repeatedly by construction equipment. For this project, he seamlessly dovetailed in style with both the architect and interior designer by using complementary materials to create an integrated environment. But below the surface may be some of his best work.

Perhaps inspired by the years spent earlier on his marsh project, Mr. Piazza sculpted the subsoil on this very different property to create underground water flow.