In the Garden With Jane Iselin

Hurricane Gloria was about to strike Long Island in September 1985 when Jane Iselin and her friend decided to take the three-hour round-trip car ride from her home in Roslyn east to Southampton to hear the painter Robert Dash talk about art at Southampton College.

The two women were so fascinated with the lecture, they spent time talking to Dash, instead of dashing home.

“Why don’t you come home with me?” Dash asked his new acquaintances. “I can show you my gardens and my studio.”

When reports of the storm circulated, Iselin and her friend shrugged it off. “Well that’s silly,” Iselin recalled thinking. “It was gorgeous all day.”

“Do have a drink,” insisted Dash when they arrived at what is now Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack.

“His drinks are lethal,” Iselin reminisced. “Suddenly all hell broke loose. The upshot was we spent the night.”

Dash was fast asleep when the women woke up. “We walked outside and the salt spray had turned everything white. It was bizarre,” she said. “That started my love affair with gardening on Long Island.”

Dash was the reason Iselin moved to Bridgehampton after her divorce and her two daughters, Eve and Andrea, were grown. She had been working as a professional fundraiser for the United Way.

“I wanted to start a new life,” she said. “I never looked back.”

When Iselin moved to Bridgehampton in the early 1990s, she became East End director of the American Cancer Society. “Then I retired,” she said. “Now I devote my life happily to being a community volunteer, which I find incredibly rewarding.”

Iselin was honored by the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons at their Garden Fair Preview Party last month, not so much for her gardening skills, but for her commitment to the community.

She donates one day a week at each of the following organizations, which all raise money for the community: the Bridgehampton Food Pantry, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Church Thrift Shop, the Book Bay at Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons, Madoo Conservancy and St. Anne’s Episcopal Church.

“I’m really like a shark. Unless I keep moving, unless I plan activities, I can look at cat videos for like 12 hours,” she said.

Iselin lives between six stop signs. Her quintessential cottage sits in a triangle at the epicenter of Bridgehampton, where School Street, Church Lane and Hildreth Lane meet. “I can walk anywhere I need to go,” she said.

On a sunny Tuesday in June, Iselin is taking some rare time to sit at her garden table, under the shade of a maple tree.

“Six or seven years, I’ve been in this noisy location,” she said. “I’ll be 90 so I’m not making any long-term plans to move.”

Her white Mini Cooper in the driveway represents Iselin’s English roots, time spent with her paternal family in England and touring famous gardens in the countryside with her parents.

Her parents’ story started much like hers and Dash’s, at a lecture.

Her father, Archie Thornton, was a horticulturist specializing in alpine plants. He studied at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London and came to the United States in 1930 to work on the stonecroppings at Innisfree Garden in Millbrook, New York, for Walter Beck.

Thornton was giving a talk on rock gardens there. Her mother, Lois Travis Thornton, was a gardener from Poughkeepsie, but not all that interested in the topic of rocks. Begrudgingly, she went along with her friend, sat in the front row and immediately went “goo-goo” for the handsome horticulturist. Her sudden enthusiasm was returned in kind.

“That was 1932,” Iselin said. “The rest is history.”

As an only child, Iselin remembers being dragged to look at gardens. “My father would go off with some experts for hours,” she said. “It was always raining in England. Before synthetic fabrics, we always wore wool. Always wet wool.”

“I disliked gardening intensely,” she admitted.

Still, she got her frustration out in a healthy way by breaking terracotta pots so the broken shards could be used at the bottom of other terracotta pots to slow down drainage.

“I had a hammer, and I’d break up clay pots for my father,” she said. “That was my only happy memory.”

Today, it’s called therapy.

Iselin grew up in New York City, where her father taught botany at Barnard, and Westport, Connecticut. She went to Bennington College in Vermont and married Charles Iselin, an engineer who attended Williams at the same time.

“Bennington girls married Williams boys and then divorced,” she said.

She and Dash continued their friendship, and she served as chairman of the Madoo board for six years. “He was under dialysis in his last years,” Iselin said. “Then he died, and I inherited his dog with a leash. He was not house-broken.”

Sadly, however, Barnsley, the Norwich terrier, was “put to sleep during COVID,” and Iselin was frantic to get another companion.

“You can’t adopt a dog over 80,” she said. “A friend and I got litter mates from Atlanta, Georgia. My daughter refers to the dog as her inheritance.”

Domino, a shih-poo — a shih tzu-poodle mix — runs and hides behind the native coral honeysuckle.

“Poodles must be exhausted,” she said, due to their breeding popularity.

“We have a wonderful thing going on here. I plant. Domino digs it up.”

Snacking on strawberries, biscuits and iced tea seems to be a little bit of a struggle.

“I’m sitting here thinking I’ve got to trim this,” she said, gesturing toward a large azalea. “Gardeners never sit down.”

“Basically, the shrubbery and brick terrace was here,” she said. “I put in the perennial border around the terrace.” She added a trellis to enclose the white picket fence, and covered it with fall clematis.

Lavender, marjoram, mint, sedum groundcover, rose campion and pink chrysanthemum line the walkway, and her new obsession, scented geraniums in pots, decorates the doorway.

Iselin’s parents didn’t have a garden of their own. “You’ve heard of the shoemakers,” she said.

Her love of gardening blossomed slowly, and she passed the genes on to both of her daughters, who do have gardens of their own.

Iselin greets guests at Madoo’s entrance on Saturdays. “People come from all over the world to Madoo, but people in Sagaponack have never been there,” she said. “When they leave I always ask them their impression, and most people use the word ‘magical.’”

Madoo charged a small entrance fee until board member Charlotte Moss subsidized the entry cost so it was free to the public. “It came out in the paper, and the next week I had masses of people,” Iselin said. “I didn’t think it would make a difference, but was I wrong.”

Iselin emphasizes her love of gardening is really a love of people.

“I have very little tolerance for complainers, and gardeners are generally optimistic people. You really cannot be a know-it-all,” she said. “You can have all the money in the world and you can’t control Mother Nature in the garden. It makes you humble.”

Iselin bends down to cut branches from a black pussy willow that Dash gifted her, and gives them to a visitor.

“Take the bottom leaves off and put them in water. Put one in a clear glass bottle and another in color glass, one in sunlight, one in shade,” she said. “They should grow roots. Put them in the ground.”

She doesn’t use any chemicals to promote growth in roots or otherwise.

“This is an experiment,” Iselin said. “I just let nature take its course. If it’s going to die, it’s going to die.”

Sure enough, weeks later, as the leaves turn brown and crisp on the branches, bright white roots begin to emerge below the surface of the water.