Bridge Gardens Opens Saturday For The Season

When Bridge Gardens opens for the season on Saturday, April 5—free admission is offered both that day and on Sunday, April 6—the gardens’ glory will begin to unfurl in stages, starting with a bulb display this month, followed by herbs and vegetables in May, roses in June, and so on, as the 5-acre spread becomes increasingly lush and colorful with the growing season.

Thanks to the tenacity of this past winter, some plants may be a bit behind schedule. Scratch a little deeper, though, and you’ll find plenty of life right now.

“There’s always something different to come see,” the gardens’ manager, Rick Bogusch, said during an exploration of the grounds, located on Mitchell Road in Bridgehampton, last week. White snowdrops were fading, brave purple crocuses had poked up, and a witch hazel was sending out spidery red petals.

Vegetables were growing in cold frames and under protective covers. A new edgeworthia, which Mr. Bogusch planted outside last year in the shelter of the visitors center, was putting out buds. “I was worried about it all winter,” the gardener said with what sounded like relief.

Harry Neyens and Jim Kilpatric founded Bridge Gardens in 1988, establishing a formal garden with 180 different herbs with culinary, medicinal, ornamental and textile-dyeing uses; a collection of 800 antique and modern rose varieties; topiary yews, including a bear, a dog and geese; a hidden bamboo “room” popular with children; a water garden; an ivy maze; specimen trees and shrubs; perennial beds and borders; and double hedgerows of privet with “viewing ports.”

In 2008, Mr. Neyens and Mr. Kilpatric donated Bridge Gardens to the Peconic Land Trust, which stepped up educational programming and appointed Mr. Bogusch, a master gardener and landscape architect, as the gardens’ manager.

Since then, the basic footprint of the gardens has remained essentially the same, with its inner and outer gardens, according to Yvette DuBow-Salsedo, the land trust’s director of marketing and communications. However, vegetable gardens have been added, a lavender parterre is in the process of being replaced, and there is now a parking area for visitors.

In addition, Mr. Bogusch said, sections of lawn are being replaced with meadow grasses and other plantings, and there is, overall, an increased focus on sustainability and on food production, which he pointed out is not at all incompatible with beauty.

Last week, in fact, Mr. Bogusch had already harvested spinach he planted last fall and then covered—something he said everyone should do for a welcome early crop. Arugula and radishes were on their way up under cold frames or protective blankets, and there was talk of kale and dandelions and chicory.

Bridge Gardens has a vegetable bed designated for food pantries, and Mr. Bogusch said a dedicated row keeps the Sag Harbor Food Pantry supplied with cilantro.

“I was able to overwinter carrots and harvest them in March,” he said, noting that now is the time to start broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower indoors.

The gardener gives that sort of advice at talks offered throughout the season, the next one being a composting workshop on May 17, followed by what promises to be a fragrant wine and roses event on June 21. In the meantime, a “Conversations With …” food lecture series, with guest speakers, continues with “Hops and Brews” on Sunday, April 6, followed by “Fruits of the Sea” on April 27. Reservations are required to attend the talks, which started in March and have been quite popular, according to Mr. Bogusch.

Ongoing watercolor workshops with Lois Bender, also at the education center, require preregistration; meanwhile, a Peconic Plein Air exhibit continues to hang on the center’s walls.

Mr. Bogusch started working outdoors in the gardens in early March, continuing to take small steps and making adjustments here and there. A cover crop of red clover, followed by “something else,” will replace the lavender garden, another vegetable bed will be added, and pumpkins and quinua will most likely be planted temporarily.

“You can do a lot of things like that,” Mr. Bogusch said of taking transitional steps to add new and different plants, on occasion having to wait, like many other gardeners, until “when I have the money” to start or complete a project.

“Not everyone can have an instant Hamptons landscape,” he pointed out.

The land trust’s new focus on growing food, which ties into educational programs offered at the center, seems to make sense at another level as well. Bridge Gardens used to be a potato farm and its soil is Bridgehampton loam, considered the most fertile in the state. The education center, which also serves as Mr. Bogusch’s residence, both resembles and stands on the former site of a potato barn.

Mr. Bogusch, who’d recently taken his lavender outdoors, then brought it back in when the temperatures plummeted, and continues to worry how the roses will make out after last winter, said it was the worst he had seen in his days on Mitchell Lane.

He wasn’t complaining, however. “Five acres in the middle of Bridgehampton ain’t bad,” he pointed out—and the promise those acres held for new life, even in the midst of a slow-arriving spring, was abundantly clear.