Southampton History Museum Hosts Outsider's View Garden Tour September 12

What would have been the Southampton History Museum’s 11th annual Insider’s View House Tour was planned for May before the coronavirus pandemic derailed the event. Now the museum is taking a new tack in light of the times: a socially distant garden tour.

The inaugural event, “An Outsider’s View: A Tour of Southampton’s Gardens,” will take place on the afternoon of Saturday, September 12, and feature five gardens and landscapes in North Sea and Southampton Village. Each stop on the tour offers rare access to a private property.

The Taft Compound was built around an 1897 Queen Anne-style main house and today has three separate residences. According to the museum, the current owners conceived of the compound’s gardens in the 1970s and executed the plan over a decade. Standing out on the grounds are a large weeping beech, an even bigger copper beech from Virginia, and one-of-a-kind features that the owners themselves designed and built, including Palladian-style gates, and fencing that maintains its height despite changes in grade.

The Captain Daniel Halsey house is a 1742 former farmhouse and inn on Old Montauk Highway. The center-chimney colonial architecture and prominent street presence are reminders of the home’s origins, according to the museum. It since became the first retail nursery and garden design store on the South Fork. The nursery stock had overgrown the property when the current owners bought it in 1998. The owners removed green aluminum siding from the historic structure and restored and preserved it while taming the grounds. Two copper beech trees from the property’s days as a nursery now frame the house joined by a 100-year-old weeping hemlock and a southern Magnolia planted as a 6-foot living memorial days after 9/11.

The Orchard is hidden behind hedgerows and a gate, but once inside, visitors are greeted by a classic shingle-style home and 3 acres of lush lawns punctuated by plantings added over a number of years. The estate derives its name from its 32 apple trees. It also boasts hydrangeas and, new this year, seven hornbeams and eight crepe myrtles. Geraniums planted in 2020 were chosen to echo similar color accents around the property.

“Camp at Cedar Crest” was originally a kit house displayed at the 1939 World’s Fair, according to the museum. Now sitting on the waterfront with views of Conscience Point and Robbins Island, the house is surrounded by an informal landscape that has been allowed to evolve naturally over time with no specific plan.

Port of Missing Men, in the Cow Neck section of North Sea, overlooks Scallop Pond and was the vacation retreat of Standard Oil heir Colonel Henry Huddleston Rogers Jr. Rogers had architect John Russell Pope design a Colonial Revival house based on a cottage that previously stood on the spot, built for Captain Jackomiah Scott in 1661

An entry court leads to the back terrace, which overlooks Scallop Pond. Copses of native beech, locust and cherry trees spot the open fields.

Rogers’s grandson Peter Salm inherited the estate and became known for his stewardship of the Cow neck wetlands, according to the museum. Today, the Port of Missing Men hosts salt marsh cordgrass, sea lavender and glasswort, as well as great blue herons, egrets, black ducks, ospreys and more water birds.

The Port of Missing Men will also be the site of the post-tour Champagne reception.

The Saturday, September 12, Outsider’s View Tour will run from 1 to 4 p.m. followed by a Champagne reception from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Admission is $150 in advance of $175 on the day of the event. Proceeds support the Southampton History Museum’s education programs. Purchase tickets in advance by calling 631-283-2494 or visiting southamptonhistory.org. Tickets may be picked up or purchased on the day of the tour starting at 10:30 a.m. at the Halsey Homestead, 249 South Main Street, Southampton.