Six Gardens On Display For Annual 'ARF Garden Tour'

After one of their dates 18 years ago, Herb Friedman just knew, he recalled. He knew his girlfriend was meant to be a gardener.

“I walked Karen into her apartment and it was full of geraniums,” he said of his now-wife’s former apartment in Manhattan.

“And tomatoes on my windowsill,” Karen Friedman answered, sitting next to her husband on the outside steps of their home in Bridgehampton last Tuesday afternoon.

“I knew gardening was something she loved because she went through the effort to plant a lot in a little apartment,” he said. “And now here we are.”

He gestured around them to the bearded irises, lilacs and a hedge of linden trees, eliciting a bark from the couple’s 3-pound Yorkshire terrier, Lily.

“Yes, here we are, after a lot of trial and error on my part,” Ms. Friedman said, calming the puppy with a stroke across her back. “I’m out here every day. It becomes very obsessive and you can’t stop. It’s never ending.”

The 1.8-acre garden will be in tip-top shape this weekend when the Friedmans open it for the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons’ annual “ARF Garden Tour” on Saturday, June 18. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the event has made its mark on the garden-tour world, and after visitors lead themselves through six featured gardens in Bridgehampton and Sagaponack, they will come away impressed, said Barbara Slifka, who is co-chairing this year’s event with Mark Fichandler.

“Come and enjoy different ways people garden,” Ms. Slifka said during a telephone interview last week. “I think people get ideas for their own gardens. And even if you don’t have a garden, you can come dream about having one. It’s like a little fashion show with plants.”

The key to the garden tour is showcasing many gardening styles, Ms. Slifka said. The Friedman garden, which features a naturalistic park-like landscape, differs entirely from Cynthia and Edwin Hamowy’s series of garden rooms in Bridgehampton, all with a distinct carpet of brick and stone. But the expansive gardens owned by Stanley and Susan Reifer in Bridgehampton are perhaps the most unusual of them all.

“The only word to describe my garden is incomparable,” Mr. Reifer said during a telephone interview last week. “There’s nothing like it. It has more than 2,000 plants, and it’s all about the way the garden is laid out. You pull into the driveway and the Oriental world begins.”

Inspired by Mr. Reifer’s childhood love for Chinese art and design, artist Jian-Guo Xu said last week that he laid out the gardens like one of his paintings, but transformed a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional space. It was no easy task, he said.

“When I designed this garden, I tried to present the culture of America,” he said. “The owner obviously liked the culture of Japan and China. But it’s America, you get all of the beauty of different cultures as one. It’s multi-culture, and it’s the hidden meaning of the garden. The nature speaks for itself.”

The 3.5-acre property features a bamboo fence shipped from China and a musical solarium. Gravel, grass and handmade mosaic pathways lead from one section of the garden to another, stopping at a pool house, teahouse pagoda and a 3,200-gallon koi pond that is illuminated at night, according to water gardens manager Larry Kaiser. A 12,000-gallon water garden will soon include 400 water plants, such as cattail, lotus and lilies, he added.

The garden holds an artistic beauty in the different colors, shapes, materials and even sounds, Mr. Xu said.

“If you really sit down and enjoy the quiet, you appreciate the garden, appreciate the life,” he said.

Ms. Slifka said the tour’s planning process begins in January. This year, the event will honor Howard Purcell, who served on the board of directors and discovered the first Hamptons gardens to ever be featured on the tour. He died in July 2010.

“This was all Howard’s creation. He loved gardens and thought people would like to see them,” Ms. Slifka said. “When it started off, it was very small and very inexpensive. He knew it was hard to raise money for an animal shelter, but thanks to him, he did and we still are. It’s our little attempt to raise some money to maintain our shelter, which no one understands is expensive to run.”

The Friedmans said they were happy to open their garden for the tour simply for their love of animals. They watched as their puppy playfully pounced through the daisies, oakleaf hydrangeas and Chinese rhubarb before Mr. Friedman scooped her up into his arms.

The garden was first designed to be woodsy, Ms. Friedman reported. But she said she wanted it to be prettier. So she planted forget-me-nots and bluebells, rambling roses that cover the tall pergola by the pool, and a vegetable and herb garden populated by zucchini, beets, lettuce, cabbage, strawberries and eggplant.

“Oh, and these foxgloves,” she breathed out, reaching toward the dainty flower. “Those are my favorite things.”

Mr. Friedman smiled at his wife and then looked around the garden’s upper level.

“See these right here?” he said, pointing to a pot. “This is my job, tomato plants. And I think I’m doing a pretty good job.”

The couple descended a flight of stone steps and strolled along the garden’s lower tier, Ms. Friedman stopping occasionally to pull at stray weeds.

“I just love the end result,” Ms. Friedman said. “I love being outside. I love the tranquility. I love how creative it is. I just get lost in the gardening.”

“It’s an enchanted garden,” her husband added. “That’s what I like to call it, anyway.”

The Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons will host its 25th annual “ARF Garden Tour” in Bridgehampton and Sagaponack on Saturday, June 18, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine. Tickets cost $75 for the tour alone, or $175 for the tour and cocktail reception, which will be held at the East Hampton home of Joanne and Henry Breyer after the tour. For more information or to purchase tickets, call 537-0400, ext. 216 or visit arfhamptons.org.