'Much Ado About Madoo' Celebration On Saturday

Robert Dash misses the summer of 1966.

Without much of a plan, the painter had just traded in his Manhattan flat, along with the city’s bustle and gargantuan rats, for nearly two acres of open fields in Sagaponack.

There was no refrigerator, no machinery, no noise. Just kerosene lights and wonderful cocktail parties on a swath of land—“a sea of green and gray,” as Mr. Dash calls it—that would soon be transformed into the garden that is today known as “Madoo.”

“I started the garden in ’67, and I was 3 at the time,” Mr. Dash joked, holding a straight face during an interview on Friday at his home in Sagaponack.

Just two days earlier, he’d turned 80.

“And God no, I had no idea what I was doing,” he continued. “I just proceeded blunder by blunder, increment by increment, just as I would a painting. When you stop making mistakes, you stop learning.”

Mr. Dash works in his garden at least twice a day, he said, and it is constantly evolving. It will never be finished, he added.

“In short, gardening is problematic and I don’t understand why anyone does it,” he said. “Me? I just love it. I always loved growing things. Always. And then I got very tired of renting places in Maine, Vermont, wherever, starting a vegetable garden and then having to leave it. I wanted my own garden, damn it.”

And Mr. Dash certainly has it now. On Saturday, June 18, his botanical creation in Sagaponack will be the set of the day-long event “Much Ado About Madoo (and 80, Too)” featuring a market, topiary workshop and lectures in celebration of Mr. Dash’s birthday and his 45 years in the garden.

Honorary event chairwoman Charlotte Moss first laid eyes on Madoo about 30 years ago, she recalled during a telephone interview last week.

“It was explosive, exuberant. It was personal and that’s what I loved about it,” the interior designer said. “It was inspirational. Seeing gardens like that give you permission, and we all need that. It’s an artist’s garden.”

Painting and gardening are “sisters of the wrist,” Mr. Dash explained.

“They both have very simple tools and basically no rules,” he said. “The only way you learn about it is doing it. Do it, do it. Dive in, get dirty, and then we’ll talk.”

Not only has Mr. Dash’s garden inspired Ms. Moss, but it also stirred author and gardener Page Dickey’s creativity, which she applied to her own garden in North Salem, New York—the subject of her new book, “Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden” that she will be signing at Madoo on Saturday.

“The book’s about the aging garden and the aging gardener,” she said during a telephone interview last week. “I love Bob’s garden. It’s quirky, it’s fun, it’s creative. It’s just what gardens should be. It’s original and he breaks rules and makes wonderful surprises.”

The key, Mr. Dash said, is interrupting the garden’s bursts of color, surprises and optical illusions with areas of dullness.

“You can’t keep hitting somebody in the eyeballs,” he said. “The eyes have to rest. Like in spring, when you see certain gardens that have 20,000 azaleas in bloom and it just looks like the overflow of a soda fountain. It’s quite disgusting. You can’t do it that way, that’s bad.”

Mr. Dash began his garden by cutting huge paths through the grass with his neighbor’s tractor, he said, and changing them whenever he wished. He built up the garden in two ways: from the house out and from the property edge in. Over his many years spent outdoors, he’s contracted Lyme disease five times, he reported.

He planted all of the flowers and trees from seedlings or young whips, nothing over 6 feet tall, explained Win Knowlton, president of the Madoo Conservancy Board. Today, the gardens are popping with rhododendrons, roses, iris, peonies and lilies, alongside clematis, alliums, viburnum, deutzia, baptisia and campanula, to name just a few.

“Some years, the Paul’s Himalayan musk looks like an atom bomb. Pink everywhere,” Mr. Knowlton commented during a tour of the grounds on Friday morning. “Fantastic.”

Mr. Dash often mixes in wild flowers or even weeds, like sweet Cicely, with the more classic plants and bold, brightly-painted furniture interspersed throughout the garden.

“I like colors that carry the garden through four seasons of the year,” Mr. Dash said. “One color I cannot stand and is just absurd out here is white. White is not white for more than an hour before it dries and then gets dingy and mildewed and tacky. Green is out of the question, too, because it in no way ever approaches the greener foliage.”

Instead, Mr. Dash said he thinks in terms of young growth. He typically uses reds, blues, yellows and oranges in his garden palette.

Mr. Dash’s color technique is unlike any that topiary expert Natasha Hopkinson has ever seen, she said.

“I think it’s just because he has an eye as a painter,” she said during a telephone interview last week. “He’s a multi-talented Renaissance man.”

In a garden that she says utilizes topiary in a subtle and sophisticated way, Ms. Hopkinson will run a workshop during the event that allows participants to experiment with topiary under her supervision.

“It’s really not as hard to do as you think because if you cut something incorrectly, you just wait a while and it grows back in,” she said. “Gardening doesn’t have to be complicated. I think it’s almost innate in us that we want to garden and we want to be part of the earth.”

As the garden stands right now, Mr. Dash says he is pleased with it.

“But it’s like when you complete a good painting,” he said. “You don’t glow with pride. You just have this feeling of mild satisfaction and you feel as if, well, I’ll stand by this. Right, Barnsley?”

He looked down from his chair at the 4-year-old Norwich terrier, whose whole body wiggled with excitement at his owner’s attention.

“Yes, there’s a sweet boy,” Mr. Dash cooed, taking a sip of tea.

“Oh, he’s sure that you’ve come to visit his garden, yes,” Mr. Dash continued. “He taught me everything I know, absolutely.”

The Madoo Conservancy will host the day-long event “Much Ado About Madoo (and 80, Too)” on Saturday, June 18, at Madoo in Sagaponack. A garden market will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $10, or free for members. Lunch lectures and book signings with authors Page Dickey and Stephen Orr begin at noon; tickets cost $75, or $60 for members. At 3 p.m., Natasha Hopkinson will teach a topiary workshop; tickets are $10, or free for members. Reservations are required for all. To purchase tickets or for more information, call 537-8200 or visit madoo.org.