Every garden tells a story
There’s nothing like a landscape at peace with man and nature, writes
THE true test of a garden is how it looks in the rain. Any landscape is lovely garnished with blue skies and butterflies. But in a summer storm? As I turned onto a almost three-hectare eastern Long Island garden in pelting rain the other day, the first things I noticed were two gravel tracks, bordered by waterlogged shrubs and the dim silhouette of landscape designer John Beitel, sheltering in his vehicle. Without any of the usual clues — there were no manicured panels of privet, overfertilised rose beds or aggressive hydrangeas — I could as easily be meandering through a remote forest preserve as a Hampton Bays garden on the edge of the Peconic Bay.
I rolled down a window. “My car or yours?”
“It’ll blow over soon,” Beitel predicted, jumping into the passenger seat of my rental car to wait out the weather with a confidence I admired even if I didn’t share it. But Beitel knows his turf, having grown up just a few kilometres away in a bucolic South Shore village called Bellport.
Earlier in the morning, he had sailed across choppy waters from Fire Island, and he was “fairly sure” that he would be able to make it back, he said.
We seemed to be parked at the misty edge of a long gravel driveway, at the end of which appeared to be a half-hidden, flatroofed house. Was something growing on top? A hammock supported by a sassafras tree and a wild cherry tree, at a Long Island home landscaped by Beitel.
A home on Long Island designed by Beitel.
“Rooftop meadow,” Beitel confirmed. He has been designing gardens for 36 years, and this may be his favourite. Part of the reason, certainly, is that this low-slung house belongs to the land instead of the other way around. The architect Caleb Mulvena of Mapos, who designed the house to replace a cottage that came with the property, sited it unobtrusively behind a rise; from the driveway, your eye naturally goes past it in favour of the horizon.
HIGH DEMAND LANDSCAPES
Other details came into view through the windshield. Surrounding the house was a mini-prairie of golden grasses, vivid now against the grey backdrop. Drifts of rainheavy Queen Anne’s Lace and butterfly weed added muted dabs of colour.
Silhouetted against the sky were lovely old trees, including a majestic sycamore the clients had decreed untouchable during the renovation process. From what I could see, this was the sort of quintessentially American landscape that Walt Whitman might have been thinking about when he described the prairie as “pure luminous colour fighting the silent shadows”.
Or you could call it a no-garden garden. With a limited palette (layers of green-ongreen texture), native shrubs and hardy perennials that draw little attention to themselves individually, landscapes like this are in high demand these days among homeowners who want to live in serene surroundings without having to actually garden.
(“When I started out,” Beitel said, “a lot of my clients were very active gardeners, always in the garden working. Even my weekend people. But nowadays, high maintenance is a recipe for a short-lived garden.”)
Every garden tells a story about the family that owns it. This three-year-old one belongs to an entrepreneurial French couple who live with their children most of the year in Hong Kong.
(They spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy.)
In the summer, when they spend six or more weeks on Long Island, family members are most likely to be found outdoors in a hammock, swimming in the pool, or playing an after-dinner pickup game of soccer.