6 Photos
By Gardens by Romi. COURTESY LONGHOUSE RESERVE
By Geoffrey Nimmer. COURTESY LONGHOUSE RESERVE
By Landcraft Garden Foundation. COURTESY LONGHOUSE RESERVE
By Marders. COURTESY LONGHOUSE RESERVE
By Peconic River Herb Firm. COURTESY LONGHOUSE RESERVE
A 2022 Plants On + Off the Ground entry By Summerhill Landscapes. COURTESY LONGHOUSE RESERVE
LongHouse Reserve’s biennial Planters On + Off the Ground container gardening competition returns on Saturday, June 24, with interior designer and Town & Country contributing design editor David Netto serving as judge.
Each competitor is given a 25-square-foot area at LongHouse Reserve, the late Jack Lenor Larsen’s sculpture garden in East Hampton, and a week to build and grow. LongHouse advises guests to expect “inventiveness, imagination, and innovation.”
Netto, who will be flying back to East Hampton from London the night before specifically to make it to the event, does not have a horticulture background but said during an interview last week that he comes with “great enthusiasm and a certain level of connoisseurship about the design world generally.”
Though he has visited LongHouse Reserve before and had a great time meeting Larsen, this will be his first time attending a Planters On + Off the Ground opening event. He said he is not going into it with the attitude of a stuffy flower show judge.
“I think that irreverence and humor is a big part of this event, from what I’ve gathered,” he said. “... It’s not a tailored, highly intellectualized process to put these vessels and plants together. People seem to just sort of go for it. When I’m judging something like that, I’m not judging it like a car show where the restoration is completely meticulous and academic. I think we’re looking for things that are spirited. And good taste has a place in all of this, but I think courage does as well, and innovation and humor.”
He said he’ll be looking for the “daredevils” and thinks the event is about celebrating the “zaniness” of the garden community in the context of Larsen’s garden — “which everybody loves.”
“It seems like a bohemian event to me, not really about rules and the sort of oppression of good taste,” he said. “So I offer that, because that’s in the DNA of the Hamptons. We had that out here before all the money came and made everything so piss-elegant.”
He said what he knows about flower shows he learned from a fantastic scene in the 1942 film “Mrs. Miniver” in which a grand woman who won the finest rose contest in the annual village flower show each year decides instead to present the award to the local station master. The station master then dies in a bombing, minutes after he gets the award. “And it’s one of the most beautiful sequences in film,” Netto said. “And she’s so glad she did this, because it’s the last thing that ever happens to him.”
The woman, Lady Beldon, is played by Dame May Whitty.
“I intend to channel her as the judge for my excellent judging that I’m going to show in this, and the magnanimity that she shows, the incorruptibility that she shows will all be present in first-, second- and third awards,” Netto said, tongue planted in cheek.
Participants for the 11th edition will include Monica Banks, Scott Bluedorn, Judiann Carmack-Fayyaz, Christina Stubelek Garden Design, deMauro + deMauro Landscape Design, Elizabeth A Lear Landscape Associates, Hamptons Grass & Bamboo, Harvest and Bloom, Hedges & Gardens/The Irony Ltd., Hortulano, LaGuardia Design Group, Landcraft Environments Ltd., LaPenna-Lee Gardens and Tyler Graphics, Marders, Hope Sandrow, Soil Inc., Studio Melrose, Summerhill Landscapes, Joshua Werber, Nico Yektai LLC, and Abbie Zabar Inc.
Tickets for the Planters On + Off the Ground XI opening event are $40, or $30 for LongHouse Reserve members. The event will begin on Saturday, June 24, at 4:30 p.m. with judging at 6 p.m. Visit longhouse.org to reserve.
