a garden in east hampton defies the odds – and conventions – incorporating elements of english, Italian and eastern traditions and sensibilities in its planting
In the most unexpected location, a lush coastal garden champions a global approach
At the end of a winding lane bordered by a tangle of honeysuckle and wild roses lies a magical garden far removed from a traditional East Hampton manicured showpiece. To the sounds of waves crashing on the beach, this one unfolds like the petals of a flower in surprising and delightful ways, a pleasure still fresh to its owners, Katharine and William rayner. If Kathy had asked anyone whether it might be possible to create an intricately elaborate garden on the leeward side of a sand dune between the roaring atlantic and georgica Pond, she would have been told no. But Kathy didn’t ask – she went ahead and did just that.
after renting Woody house for eight years, Kathy bought it in the late eighties not long before her marriage to Billy, and fixed it up just in time for the arrival of hurricane Bob. In the decades since, the sloping terrain’s cutting garden and few flower beds have evolved into a magnificent confection of spaces, paths, vistas, bowers, and follies that invoke the garden cultures of england, Italy, Persia and India. not lacking in a garden pedigree – her mother, anne cox chambers, created, with Peter coats, rosemary Verey, and ryan gainey, the celebrated sixteen-hectare grounds of her Provençal home, Le Petit Fontanille – Kathy nurtured her interest in horticulture by visiting storied estates and reading voraciously on the subject. she admits to feeling most affected by the memoirs of Babur, founder of the Mogul empire, and the writings of Vita sackville-west – representing a span of five centuries.
so she was very much at home within the walls of the Persian garden, as woven into ancient carpets, long before she travelled to Iran herself in autumn 2015. Visiting the legendary gardens of Italy, Kathy understood that their reliance on architectural elements would be completely inappropriate if divorced from their stone villas, though some things could be borrowed. From sissinghurst, she not only imported the idea of a White garden, she realized that its tiny passages were just what she should adopt on Long Island because an intricate evergreen structure would help tame the winds and protect the plants.
she moved the original cutting bed to make way for an open Italian garden, complete with a shell-encrusted grotto created by simon Verity from tufa, local seashells, quartz and limestone, with dripping fountains and massive shell chairs on either side. Inspired by Villa Medicea di castello in Florence, the garden makes a perfect spot for dinner on a moonlit night, with lanterns around the shimmering pool and the grey-green leaves of olive trees, silver-leafed licorice, and Artemisia glinting across the water.
an existing walled herb garden became a Mogul enclave, inspired by India’s response to Persian influence and thus reflecting two cultures at once – there’s only so much space on a sand dune. a pair of marble elephants greets visitors at the garden’s upper level before they descend by a small, double flying staircase – evoking the one at swan house in Kathy’s native atlanta – that encircles a carved fountain in the shape of the hindu deity ganesha. his spouting trunk is the spring of a bridged rill running down the garden’s centre, planted with lotus, water lilies, and water lettuces and leading to another fountain in the shape of a lotus flower lazily gurgling cooling water over its marble surface.
This is a folly in the true sense of the word. don’t be surprised to one day see a purely Persian paradise squeezed in somewhere, just as a new vegetable garden, with enclosures woven from the invasive phragmites that edge the pond, is already in the works. The project never has to end, because there was never a master plan.
The Mogul garden is perhaps the most elaborate of all the spaces, and therefore also where the sound of ocean waves is the most unexpected; but you can step out of it and be somewhere very different at the swing of a gate – perhaps the almost tropical-looking Mediterranean Walk, with its rusticated oak arbor inspired by the gardening genius gertrude Jekyll. or the dog garden. dogs are important to the rayners, who have five, and a standing order with the local pet-adoption society, arf (animal rescue Fund of the hamptons), to send along rescue Pekingese as they appear. The hoops Walk, an homage to Monet’s garden at giverny, is a glorious meandering grass path flanked by a colourful riot of poppies, old-fashioned hollyhocks, Rudbeckia, and
Phlox, and, overhead, hoops covered in a burst of five kinds of pink roses.
You can walk this garden and the changing light will keep you constantly entertained. From the Pear Tunnel, where espaliered fruit trees are interplanted with Rosa ‘reine des Violettes’ and Clematis ‘Étoile Violette’ to hang as a purple fringe overhead, you will occasionally hear the squawks of guinea hens in their enclosure near the guest cottage (a former boathouse renamed the Pond house). You might even see a purple martin returning to one of the towering cluster of houses beyond the greenhouse, having eaten its daily quota of mosquitoes.
roses are everywhere in these gardens, and guests flock to visit, guided by Kathy’s accomplice of fifteen years in matters horticultural, John hill, who offers a litany of their names. The provenance of one beauty may not be on their curriculum: This stranger caught my eye on a corner trellis near the front door. Kathy tells me it started out as a nameless Korean-deli purchase, left behind in its little foil-wrapped plastic pot after a birthday luncheon. she took it home and put it in the ground. It has climbed up the trellis and opens its buds to look more like the Tudor rose of heraldry than Rosa
‘York and Lancaster.’
cellphones don’t work well here, and more than once has a stray visitor kept the others waiting to sit down at the table. It is a playful spirit that has created these gardens, in consultation with both friends and highly respected professionals who share a similar passion, bandying about ideas like shuttlecocks in a never-ending game of badminton.
You can walk this garden and the changing light will keep you constantly entertained