'Landscape Pleasures' Gardens Are Au Natural

Nearly 30 years ago, Joan Hamburg ventured to the East End on a quest for an antique breakfast room table.

She ended up buying a Sagaponack house instead, mostly due to its backyard.

“I just fell in love with the way this funny little piece of pie-shaped land looked. It had a lot of wonderful specimen trees,” Ms. Hamburg recalled during a telephone interview last week. “I went in the back and said, ‘I want this house.’ It was very small, by Hamptons standards, and the gardens were so overgrown that we didn’t even realize that the old footbridges that were there led to a pond.”

But when she and her husband, Mort, discovered them, it was like entering a different world, Ms. Hamburg said. Covered in moss and dotted with indigenous ferns, the property’s wetlands open up to a pond-front dock that attracts a very active bird life, Ms. Hamburg said, which she watches from a hammock in the shade during the summer.

“This garden is just, ‘Hello, I like to wave in the wind. I love wet feet and as long as I have that, I’m very happy,’” she said. “It’s not 10 acres, formal, very fancy. My gardens are very simple. They’re just like the pond and had to look like they’ve been there forever.”

Ms. Hamburg’s garden, designed by Frederico Azevedo of Unlimited Earth Care, is one of five on the Parrish Art Museum’s “Landscape Pleasures: Down The Garden Path” self-guided tour on Sunday, June 10, which is preceded by a day of lectures at the Southampton-based museum on Saturday, June 9, that will include some of the biggest names in landscape design—Oehme, van Sweden & Associates principal Eric Groft, landscape architect Doug Reed, and landscape designers Paula Hayes and Edwina von Gal.

Considering her garden’s wild nature, Ms. Hamburg said she was unsure whether she wanted to open it to the public. But judging from her tour counterparts, she is not alone. It appears the natural look is in.

“The idea is to draw attention to the beauty of individual plants, but to give the effect that we discovered them that way and are just caring for them,” Ms. von Gal, who designed a garden in Sagaponack that will be included on the tour, explained during a telephone interview last week. “I wanted the property to look as though the things we put in had always been there, as if we had inserted the house into existing things.”

From the start, the homeowners—Liz and Gus Oliver—told Ms. von Gal, “Now, there are a lot of tours, we would prefer to never be on one. We treasure our weekends and our privacy,” the designer said.

They’ve since had a change of heart.

“I said, ‘The Parrish is building a museum. Would you agree to do this, in honor of the great thing they’re doing for the community?’” Ms. von Gal recalled. “They said, ‘Okay, just this once.’ This is the only time it will ever be on a tour. I promised I’d never ask again.”

When Ms. von Gal began planning the garden close to 20 years ago, it was just a potato field on the edge of the Sagg Swamp Nature Preserve, she said, adding that she was forced to start from scratch—save for a few trees, including an old, multi-trunk red maple and multi-stem cherry tree.

Running up the driveway, she planted native dogwoods, maples, cedars and clusters of viburnum and elderberry to hide the overflow parking. All of the hedges are hand-pruned, Plant and Property owner Michael Tuths explained during a tour of the garden last week.

“This is not a flower garden. It’s really about the different greens and textures and mix of stone,” he said, referring to the stone wall that separates much of the manicured lawn from the unmowed portions. “It’s a lot of hand pruning to keep a natural look. No one comes with an electrical trimmer around here. It’s labor intensive, keeping it looking like nobody’s really taking care of it.”

Inside the gated garden, the lawn is lined with mostly non-native species, including shad trees, magnolia and Japanese fringe trees, Mr. Tuths said, which end in a group of pines.

“It’s dark, like it’s drawing you to this dark, mysterious place,” Ms. von Gal explained. “Their daughter’s name is Lily, so it’s planted with Lily of the Valley. We called that ‘Lily’s hideaway.’”

To the right is a broken orchard planted with non-fruiting cherry trees, or yoshino, Ms. von Gal said.

“I planted them in a broken grid because I was thinking, ‘I grew up upstate and there were a lot of orchards there,’” she said. “There were always places where trees were missing in the grid. I thought to make a real orchard, or something that replicated an orchard, to give a nod to what it really looks like. So I left trees out.”

The manicured lawn surrounding the house opens up into a meadow of

panicum virgatum

, or switch grass. Its mowed paths wind through the meadow and end in shady patches equipped with stone benches.

“Something like this is unusual,” Mr. Tuths said, looking across the meadow from one of the sitting areas. “It’s Edwina von Gal. That’s what makes it unusual.”

The switch grass opens up into the property’s pond, which is populated with fish and an assortment of pond-edge plants, including yellow and blue flag iris, ferns, buttercup lilies and eleocharis, a small spikerush grass.

“Over time, they’ve just made their own spaces and worked their ways together, which is always a whole lot prettier than anything you can design yourself,” Ms. von Gal said. “Letting nature do it because it just feels right to me. The plants have chosen their own, in a way. And they’re happier.”

Ms. Hamburg learned this lesson the hard way, she said. After expanding her home from about 1,500 square feet to just under 2,400 square feet, she got to work on her gardens by planting 600 perennials. She lost almost all of them because the land was so wet.

Today, the garden is filled with wetland-friendly flowers—including mallows, iris, lilies, allium, foxgloves, bonica roses and climbing hydrangea—as well as an abundance of trees and a cutting garden by the kitchen. Ms. Hamburg brought some of the plants from her last home in Vermont, she said. She couldn’t bear to leave them behind.

“I realized, don’t put in anything that can’t be wet. I have very basic, simple things, and that’s why I bought the house,” she said. “Everything said, ‘Come in. You’ve got to understand what we’ve got here.’ And we did. The house was just falling down, but I knew I needed that property.”

She laughed to herself, and added, “I never did get that table.”

The Parrish Art Museum will kick off “Landscape Pleasures: Down The Garden Path” with a symposium featuring talks by Eric Groft, Paula Hayes, Doug Reed and Edwina von Gal on Saturday, June 9, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the museum in Southampton. A cocktail party will follow later that evening. The self-guided garden tours will be held on Sunday, June 10, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at homes in Southampton, Sagaponack and East Hampton, and will also include Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton. Tickets start at $200, or $150 for members, for the symposium and tours. Tickets start at $350 for the cocktail party, symposium and tours. For more information, call 283-2118, ext. 33 or visit parrishart.org.