Finding Stillness in Motion: Nature Sets the Pace at Innisfree Garden

When Kate Kerin circles Tyrrel Lake at the heart of the rambling Innisfree Garden, she feels grounded. The iconic corner of the Hudson Valley is sustaining, she said. It is nourishing.

And no matter where she is among the garden’s 185 acres — an exploration of timeless ideas and timely management practices — she always sees something new.

“When I’m there,” she said, “I never wonder why I do the job that I do.”

Kerin is the landscape curator at Innisfree Garden, a world leader in the art of slow gardening — an innovative, nature-based maintenance strategy successfully used here for over half a century — and the topic of her upcoming lecture on Sunday with the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons.

“The whole idea is doing a little bit of work, just the right thing at the right time, with a big impact,” she said. “If you’re going to work with nature like this, you have to wait. But it is a powerful approach.”

Kerin first crossed paths with Innisfree as a young girl — the Millbrook gardens are not far from her childhood home — and again in 2011, while researching gardens for a magazine article. She met with Oliver Collins, the son of landscape architect Lester Collins, who was the visionary behind what Innisfree looks like today.

She couldn’t believe what he told her.

“I can remember sitting at this lunch, sort of saying, ‘Wait a second, so you’re telling me that Innisfree is run by your 90-year-old mother and a couple of retired IBM engineers and a technical chemist doing the maintenance? This is it? This is this whole, incredible garden?’” she related. “And he said, ‘Yeah.’”

From that moment forward, Kerin inserted herself into Innisfree — “I decided that they needed me and it just took them a little longer to come to that conclusion,” she said — and, in 2013, she was hired as a part-time seasonal gardener.

“That was kind of a crazy decision as someone who has been a single mom to a young child,” she said, “but I’m like, this place is much more important than, well, me.”

Having earned her master’s degree in landscape architecture from Cornell University, it didn’t take long for Kerin to get a title change to landscape curator.

“I started to try to understand and tell the story, which I found so compelling,” she said. “I feel like I’m still learning about it, and I can be continuing to learn from this place my whole life.”

Innisfree dates back to the late 1920s, when Walter and Marion Beck began developing the land as their private home. He, an artist, and she, a gardener, would meet Collins — who was an undergraduate at Harvard — about a decade later, marking the start of a monumental collaboration.

In 1960, after the Becks had died, Collins — whose landscapes are internationally known — opened the garden to the public. By that time, the estate was $200,000 in debt, Kerin said, which equals about $2 million today.

“He was just a really brilliant guy, this unassuming Quaker, just inventive and thought differently, but he didn’t have any money to transform this estate into a public garden,” she said. “He invented, in a way, completely new ways to garden.”

The only tools Collins had available were his own intellectual capital, the site itself and time, Kerin said. Through his 55 years with the garden, he sculpted the land and choreographed movement through space, creating dreamlike sequences of vignettes that define Innisfree. He leaned into natural ecosystems and succession arcs for each area, anticipating which plant communities would appear.

Different gardens have taken on different design jobs, Kerin said, to the point where the staff hasn’t planted a single plant in them — and the most work they do is the occasional weed-whacking.

“Understanding how nature works and good design don’t always come together. Some of the design ideas that Collins had, I think, are also things that people can use,” she said. “A big one is that way of working with your site, understanding your site and engaging natural processes on your site. But he worked with light in remarkable ways. He was really passionate about making a place that engaged people.”

The result unfolds within the sloping, rocky landscape, set within a natural bowl wrapping around the 40-acre Tyrrel Lake. It blends Japanese, Chinese and modern design with ecological principles, while keeping a soft focus on the place with a sense of wonder and awe, Kerin said.

“Even if they just want to do a little armchair travel, if people feel just one one-hundredth of the peace and the wonder that I feel at Innisfree in this short talk, I will be delighted,” she said, “and maybe they’ll even get some new ideas.”

The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons will present “Innisfree: Lessons in Slow Gardening” with Kate Kerin on Sunday, October 19, at 2 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Community Hall. Admission is $10, or free for members. For more information, visit hahgarden.org.