West End Road Garden by Harmonia Inc. Featured on Garden as Art Tour

Four private gardens in East Hampton Village will open to visitors for Guild Hall’s Garden as Art benefit on Saturday, June 24, including a West End Road garden designed and installed over the course of the last decade-plus by Roxine Brown, the founder and creative director of Bridgehampton garden and landscape design firm Harmonia Inc.

Brown celebrates her firm’s 20th anniversary this year, and the garden fronting Georgica Pond is among the gardens that Harmonia has consistently worked on the longest.

“We have a very specific look to our business, which is why we’ve done so well,” Brown said during an interview last week. “Our look is very natural, very textural, very lush, and our gardens always look like they’ve just sort of existed — like they’ve always been there.”

She said her West End Road client, who wished not to be named, is passionate about his gardens, “which is unique because most men are not the ones that are passionate about their gardens. It’s usually the women that are passionate about their gardens.”

Harmonia has done all the design, installation and maintenance on the property since her client purchased it.

“He just loves to like spend his time walking through his property, through his gardens, and enjoying everything that has been done there,” Brown said. “And every year he wants to do something new, so he’s always got something going.”

The client initially had one piece of land, overlooking Georgica Pond, where his main house is located. “It’s a beautiful setting,” Brown said.

Harmonia designed and installed everything save for preexisting specimen trees that were retained, including elms, London planetree, katsuras and crab apples. Brown describes them as big, old, ancient trees.

“We created a beautiful entrance to his front door where we put in three big islands of crape myrtles that you walk through to get to the front door, and we underplanted it with beautiful blooming Hydrangeas — ‘Twist-n-Shout’ lacecap Hydrangeas,” she recalled.

Harmonia’s next project there was a native planting, spanning 250 to 300 feet, at the client’s pond, with hibiscus, flowering perennials and grasses.

Next followed a pool garden that creates a separation between the pool and the driveway.

“That year we took on a huge project when we designed a 6-foot brick, call it a wall, but it looks like it came out of the 1800s,” Brown said. “The bricks were all handmade in Colorado for us, and we designed it with a beautiful bell-cap-curved cap to it so it really looks like it was something that has been around for hundreds of years.”

After the wall came a walkthrough garden near the pond.

“When I think about his property, I just think about how many gardens you can walk through and enjoy,” Brown said.

About four years ago, the client purchased the parcel next door, where he built an English-style conservatory/guest house.

“We created gardens over on that side as well that are in keeping with his main property,” Brown said. “So both properties are open to just pass through to one another freely.”

One of the highlights on the adjoining parcel is a 23-foot-tall arc sculpture by French artist Bernar Venet that was previously displayed on the grounds of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

Prior to her 20 years at the helm of Harmonia, Brown had a career in fashion, but her love of gardening has always been with her.

“I grew up in a family of gardeners,” she recalled of her youth in Northern California. “My grandmother was a Master Gardener. My mother was a Master Gardener, and I was, as a young child, I was always in the garden with them.”

When she bought her own home in California, she did all of the landscaping. Then her fashion career led her to move in 1985 to New York. That’s where she met her husband, Charles Fischler, and about 25 years ago they purchased a home in East Hampton. In 2003, she decided to make East Hampton her full-time residence and shift careers from fashion to garden design.

“For me, design is design,” Brown said. “Design is all about, how do you combine color and texture and proportion into something that is visually beautiful? So I didn’t really find that that transition was difficult at all.”

Being from the West Coast, she did have to learn what plant material was suited to the East End’s climate and different soil types. Having landscaped her East Hampton home before starting her business, she had already had a “laboratory,” she said.

“I had a great team of people that I brought on that had horticultural backgrounds, and I learned from them and they learned from me, in terms of design,” she said.

Her business really took off after she participated in the 2006 HC&G Idea House on Calf Creek in Southampton.

“I was asked to do the landscape at that house, and I took a very different approach to it,” she said.

Rather than a formal landscape, she designed around specimen trees and various textural grasses — with no hydrangeas. “I love hydrangeas, but I wanted to do something unique,” she said.

She also designed a large meadow in a reserve butted up to Calf Creek.

“I still have people calling me saying, ‘I saw your work at the Idea House, and I always wanted to be able to have your look,’” Brown said. “So we do have a very distinct look, and I think that’s our success.”

During the Garden as Art tour, she expects visitors to the West End Road garden will take away how informal gardens can be put into a more formal setting and will appreciate the mix of different types of plant material used in those gardens.

Garden as Art begins with a 10 a.m. talk at East Hampton Library on “Great Gardens of the World” by garden expert Vincent Simeone. Self guided tours of four East Hampton Village gardens will run from noon to 4 p.m. Tickets start at $200, or $150 for Guild Hall members. At the Patron ticket level ($500) and above, guests will be invited for a cocktail prolongé at 7:30 p.m. hosted by Cornelia and Ralph Heins at their garden, featuring a performance by Guild Hall William P. Rayner Artists-in-Residence The Beatbox House at 9 p.m. Purchase tickets at give.guildhall.org/garden.