Garden Conservancy Kicks Off Open Days Program With Four East End Gardens

Dianne Benson has grown accustomed to the sound of screeching tires.

They begin every spring, the moment her magnolia tree starts to blossom — a sight that regularly stops traffic outside her home and garden on Davids Lane in East Hampton. The 60-foot-wide tree towers high above the fence, its thousands of pink-and-white blossoms reaching toward the sky and cascading to the ground — where another world exists altogether.

Underneath the magnolia tree, the climate changes. The floor turns into a moss garden — soft, lush and accommodating for the stone statues and orbs that rest there, explained the fashion designer and gardening expert, who is known to her fans as Dianne B.

“It has its own universe,” she said.

The nearly century-old classic pink magnolia is a star on her property, and she expects it will be in full bloom this weekend for The Garden Conservancy’s kickoff of its spring Open Days flagship program, which offers visitors an opportunity to step into some of the East End’s finest private gardens, explained Horatio Joyce, director of public programs and education.

“The Open Days program had a brief hiatus during the height of the pandemic, but there was such a wild call to open back up,” he said. “People were out in nature for all sorts of reasons, so we’ve sprung back stronger than ever.”

Since 1995, Open Days has welcomed more than 1.35 million visitors into thousands of inspired private landscapes — from urban rooftops and organic farms to historic estates and innovative suburban lots — across 41 states. Since last year, Garden Conservancy membership has jumped 20 percent, Joyce reported, and he expects more garden enthusiasts on the ground than ever.

“It’s a return to old favorites,” he said of the gardens. “We couldn’t be more pleased.”

Four years after Open Days started compiling a roster of private gardens, Marshall Watson was standing on the precipice of his own — except it was raw land, set on a bluff in East Hampton, overgrown with “every kind of invasive weed you can possibly imagine,” he said, and he had no idea what he was doing.

But there was a gorgeous view of Gardiner’s Bay and lots of potential, so he and his husband, Paul Sparks, were sold.

Enlisting the help of their architect and landscape designer friends, the couple built their house and gardens from the ground up, creating allées and rooms within the half-acre space that is now home to countless varieties of flowers, trees, shrubs, and even a vegetable garden.

“It’s not a big piece of property,” Watson said. “I can really torture a piece of property, let me tell you.”

The property maintains two gardens — the first, a thoroughfare for hungry deer that faces the punishing ocean wind and salt; and, the second, a space that reflects Watson’s travels, passions and work as an interior designer, between the Italian-influenced evergreens and statuary, French-inspired espaliered trees and potager, loose borders that are English in nature, and colonial symmetry and formality.

“I think it’s the most American of gardens because it’s everything,” Watson said, adding, “I have been very much an accidental gardener. I’ve been lucky with some plant combinations and other things, I say, ‘What was I thinking?’”

Behind Charlestonian gates, a gravel forecourt is bordered by a holly stilt hedge, rhododendron bed, and a gated potager features a wisteria-draped carriage house and a neoclassic gazebo that overlooks the walled garden. It is surrounded by maples and a unique euonymus groundcover, where variegated irises and allium pop through.

A pathway made from felled oak trees on the property, post Superstorm Sandy, creates a path around the organic vegetable garden — a detail inspired by the Adirondacks — and pear and apple espaliers lead to a reflecting pool, which doubles as a swimming pool, in the center of the property.

The land is home to Siberian birches, 30 varieties of hydrangea, peonies, sedum and ivies, but the true queens of the garden are the tree peonies, Watson said.

“They are so precious. You see them in Japanese greens all the time,” he said. “It’s just this huge, voluptuous, 10-inch-diameter bloom that is the most fragile thing you’ve ever seen. The Japanese actually take their umbrellas outside and place them over the tree peonies so that the rain does not destroy them.

“They’re that revered in Japan, but they’re also revered in my garden, too,” he continued, “but I don’t have enough Japanese umbrellas.”

Beyond the Chippendale gates lies the sea garden, where boxwood, sarcococca, Sargenti cherries, osmanthus shelter peonies, asters, irises, tamarix, lambs-ear, and other deer- and weather-resistant varieties grow — with varying degrees of success.

“Plants teach you when they’re happy, when they’re not, they die, it’s a lot of heartbreak,” Watson said. “You love a plant, you nurture it, you love it, you care for it, and then it dies. That’s the humbling thing about gardening: you never know enough, so you just keep learning.”

Gardening, as Watson says, is the slowest of the performing arts. And what is planted will, eventually, grow — sometimes, a little too much.

About 15 years ago, the couple planted a pair of Hakuro-nishiki willow standards to flank the federal doorway of their Greek revival-style home — under the impression that they would grow up to 3 feet in diameter. When they went on vacation and came back, they were 14 feet.

Left with no choice, Watson pruned and shaped them, so that they now resemble “giant pink powder puffs,” he said with a laugh.

“Everybody says that you can’t stand for very long in Marshall’s garden because he’ll prune you and he’ll shape you into some form of ball or pyramid,” he said. “I’m trying to learn how to loosen up a little bit. I have some grasses, but very few.”

Next door to Watson, the “Glade Garden” by Abby Jane Brody in East Hampton is a playground for the ardent gardener and plant collector, while both Benson’s property and the four-season Biercuk and Luckey Garden in Wainscott are certified as “nature friendly gardens” — a new initiative that The Garden Conservancy rolled out in the past year, Joyce said.

“They’re not using synthetic chemicals and they’re just gardening with the environment in mind — making sure they have plants out there that attract wildlife — and it’s just a wonderful thing,” he said, adding, “I hope Open Days this year, with our nature friendly initiative, will be a real opportunity for the visiting public, which is bigger than ever, to really see what is possible when you garden in a nature friendly way. It still can be, and is often, truly beautiful.”

Organic and toxin free, Benson’s garden started in the front yard only — a condition of her wife, Lys Marigold, who wanted to preserve the vastness of the backyard. And so, the gardener got to work.

“It is the most heavily gardened part of the property,” Benson said. “It has a very beautiful collection of Japanese maples, each different, and really intense plantings of really solid things that I love.”

She plants between 1,000 and 2,000 bulbs every spring, ranging from jack-in-the-pulpits, chionodoxa and irises to forget-me-nots, daffodils and hellebores. “I think I have every kind,” she said of the latter.

Inevitably, Benson’s creativity — and collection — spilled into the backyard. First came Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick tree, with its gnarled, curly and twisted branches, followed shortly by a redbud tree, gifted to the couple by Charlie Marder at the funeral of his son, Dash.

She made a special plot for the pair and decided to keep the meadow wild — “We’ve planted a few things here and there,” she said — which backs up to a nature trail.

“I never was an artist who painted, but I was a designer who designed clothes, and my garden is a personal expression of the colors and the textures and the kind of eccentricities that I like,” Benson said. “It brings me great joy. It not only brings me joy — it clears my mind.”

Each year, Benson strives to add another layer, pattern, or new plant she found to the garden. She is constantly upgrading, or building the density, lushness and intensity, “making it vibrant and vibrate,” she said.

And she is always looking to bring in the unexpected.

“I’ve been working in this garden now for more than 15 years. It takes a long time to build a personal garden,” she said. “You can make a garden in a week, if somebody makes it for you, but to make your own garden with your own statement and your own palette, it takes years and years for it to really look like something.

“And I think, over the last couple years, it’s really looking like something.”

The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days spring program will be held on Saturday, May 7, from 10 a.m. to 3 or 4 p.m., depending on the garden. Admission is $10, $5 for members and free for children age 12 and under. For more information, or to sign up as a host, visit gardenconservancy.org/open-days.