Parrish plans garden tours to coincide with Landscape Pleasures program

The Parrish Art Museum will hold a weekend of “Landscape Pleasures” this weekend that will conclude with a self-guided tour of some of the East End’s most exquisite private gardens.

The tour will run from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 15, rain or shine.

Tickets to Landscape Pleasures, including admission to the garden tour and the symposium scheduled for Saturday, June 14, are $125 for Parrish members and $175 for non-members. Ticket holders will also enjoy exclusive access to Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack from noon to 3 p.m. on Sunday.

For complete descriptions and images of the gardens on Sunday’s tour visit the Parrish’s website, www.parrishart.org., and click on Landscape Pleasures.

Among the gardens featured on the tour:

Elli & Guy Bayer’s garden in Sagaponack.

The master plan for the Bayer garden has, at its core, the harmonious melding of 1980s contemporary architecture and the oaks and lowbush blueberry common to Sagaponack. The front shade garden, with its moss paths and largely indigenous spring perennials, becomes lush in the high season and moves seamlessly into an herb garden, a “beach-esque” perennial garden and a manicured sculpture garden. This collaboration celebrates family, the woods and beach, and showcases the importance of adherence to a site specific landscape plan, regardless of size, setting or residential architectural style.

Katerina & Gunter Frangenberg’s garden in Water Mill

Centered around an incredible 50-foot Japanese cedar tree, the Frangenberg garden is situated on three bucolic acres in north Water Mill. A free-form pool opens up to an expansive lawn with an ivy covered gazebo, a large bluestone patio and stacked stone walls. Various 60- to 80-foot black pine trees are dispersed across the garden, giving it a Mediterranean character. The garden feels like a small and tranquil oasis and is completely shielded from its surroundings, providing the visitor with a peaceful and calming experience.

Herb and Karen Friedman’s Bridgehampton garden

Armed with house plans they liked, except for the Georgian Colonial façade, and a difficult, deeply sloped site with strict native revegetation requirements, the Friedmans hired landscape architects Jack deLashmet & Associates to plan the house and develop the gardens, which are now four years old. The house was turned to the back of the property and positioned to take advantage of the landscape. The native plantings, steep grade changes, and retaining walls make the property—only 1.5 of 1.8 acres are developed—seem much more expansive. The beautiful courtyard garden, native gardens, and adjacent wooded areas all feature native plants. The boxwood parterre cutting garden is in close proximity to outdoor entertaining areas and was designed to showcase Ms. Friedman’s talents as a perennial gardener.

April Gornik and Eric Fischl’s garden in North Haven

This extraordinary walled backyard garden contains specimen Japanese maples, roses and early blooming perennials and grasses. The buildings on the property frame this large inner garden, which embraces both Japanese and contemporary design. Within the confines of the garden is a small goldfish pool and a large, curved swimming pool overhung with vines, including clematis montana and honeysuckle. The space is anchored at either end by a small birch tree garden and a roof garden filled with perennials and a pergola covered by climbing hybrid musk roses.

Carole and Alex Rosenberg’s Water Mill garden

Oehme, Van Sweden and Associates designed the Rosenberg garden in 1981 and redesigned the front garden in 2003. Dr. H. Mark Cathey, director emeritus of the U.S. National Arboretum describes Wolfgang Oehme as “having the most unusual curiosity about new plants and always looking for special introductions.” The garden reflects this curiosity with plants, many never before seen in the U.S. The broad expanses of color and texture in the flowers create an impressive visual effect. Large-scale plantings of ornamental grasses blend the property with the surrounding natural landscape of Mecox Bay.

Robert Rosenkranz and Alexandra Munroe’s garden in East Hampton

This young garden surrounds a 1928 beachfront house combining formal and naturalistic landscaping. An exuberant meadow with many varieties of perennials, self-seeding annuals and grasses is adjacent to a cottage garden and rose bed enclosed by a yew exedra. Nearby, visitors may stroll through a woodland walk and a border of cryptomeria, cypress, and rhododendron under-planted with Arisarum, ferns, and trillium. The trail ends near the dunes with ornamental grasses. The house overlooks a parterre and croquet lawn where lead urns planted informally with various annuals serve as focal points. The kitchen terrace leads to a formal vegetable and cutting garden.

Mala and Jeff Sander’s Sag Harbor garden

The deer-resistant Osmanthus hedge surrounding this property belies the intimate garden spaces and expansive views of Noyac Bay to which the visitor is treated. A front entrance garden of deciduous azaleas, viburnum, and largely native plantings peaks in the spring and leads to a perennial/cutting garden which takes the visitor to the pool and bay gardens, designed through the establishment of artificial dunes mimicking the cadence and topography of the wetlands. Designed by Jack deLashmet and Associates, it was a collaborative effort with the home owners. Mrs. Sander’s “Garden of the Seven Chakra” blooms in sequences highlighting the spectrum of the light chakra. At the time of the tour, the Chakra Garden should be highlighting the color blue.