"The Garden as Art": Guild Hall Goes Green

On Friday evening, Mary Ryan hosted a cocktail party for East Hampton’s Guild Hall annual garden tour at her rustic and rambling 16-acre estate on Accabonac Harbor in Amagansett.

Guests were directed to park their cars in an orchard or in a freshly mown hayfield. The rolling grounds of the property extend to a steep embankment overlooking the harbor. Ladies in flowing bohemian dresses and gentlemen in brightly colored sportswear strolled the grounds and gathered for drinks and hors d’oeuvres by Peter Ambrose caterers.

The center of the festivities was an old barn whose rafters were festooned with ropes of garlic from the Quail Hill Farm nearby.

Edwina Von Gal was the honorary chair of the event and she welcomed participants to the tour which featured sustainable, environmentally “smart” gardens cultivated without using pesticides or herbicides.

The next day, garden tour participants gathered at Guild Hall for a continental breakfast prepared by the Golden Pear and a lecture by Von Gal before collecting their maps and heading out in their cars to view the five gardens. Von Gal has founded a conservatory in Panama as well as designed gardens across the country. Her foundation, Perfect Earth Projects, seeks to conserve ecology globally.

The first two gardens on the tour were designed by Von Gal. One was on Lily Pond Lane, the other was off Green Hollow Road. Her signature gardens are bee-stung and carefully disheveled. She uses texture, rather than color, and the play of light and shadow, as definition. Not an annual was in sight.

The third garden was originally created by Jack Lenor Larsen, of Long House, and Jim Owen, nearly 50 years ago. Although Larsen sold the property many years ago, the current owners have continued to nurture his original plantings while adding many of their own. The 10-acre garden meanders through a forest and past an orchard to a picnic table near a pool. The garden includes a working vegetable patch as well as unique and idiosyncratic trees like the columnar maple and a monkey puzzle tree.

The final two houses on the tour were in North Haven. The first was a brand new house and garden facing the water. The owners chose to build the house to maximize the view. Terraced plots of ornamental grasses and indigenous plants lead down to a crescent sweep of beach. At the final house fruit trees and open meadows swept across acres of land with huge oaks down to a 150’ boat dock.

For pictures of the gardens and cocktail party see the two slide (2) photo slide shows below.

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