The Animal Rescue Fund Thrift and Treasure Shop will hold its annual Designer Showhouse and Sale, now an institution, this weekend, likely bringing relief to many who may have expected it to be held at what had been its traditional scheduling on Memorial Day weekend.

The organizers have gathered yet another set of accomplished and fresh designers to take objects from the thrift shop’s inventory and transform them both for inspiration and purchase.

This year’s group includes Brian P. Brandy, Jamie Drake, Kevin Hart, Tamara Magel, Mark Schryver, and Peri Wolfman. The event is co-chaired by Gordon Hoppe, Gigi Mahon, Sandra McConnell, and Jeff Pfeifle.

Participants, for the most part, report that they like the challenge of using the found objects in their designs.

For Mr. Drake, whose previous credits include show houses for Kips Bay and the Metropolitan Home Showtime house and rooms in Gracie Mansion and New York City Hall, having to incorporate the store’s objects seemed daunting at first, but he immediately found things that reflected his style. “I found some wonderful pieces, a pair of simple but elegant end tables I’m using as cocktail tables; a charming painting, and a wonderful pair of wicker chaises.”

He will incorporate some of his own things, but the event guidelines are strict: Anything used in the rooms must be for sale and for the benefit of ARF. Mostly, however, Mr. Drake was able to find things “that I could bring together in a cohesive way that reflects my style.”

Mr. Drake will be in the barn with Ms. Magel, who is designing a guest bedroom suite there. She too is excited about her thrift shop finds. “I found a lot of things from here,” she said during a conversation in one of the shop’s main rooms. She had been concerned that the day the designers arrived to choose their pieces would be somewhat of a frenzy; instead, happily, everyone gravitated to different items, pieces that reflected their own style.

Ms. Magel found two old iron beds and saw right away how she could use them, either for a guest room or a child’s room. She opted for the former: “I saw the metal bed and knew I wanted plush bedding to contrast with it.” She chose black and white for the overall scheme, with some pops of color. The theme carries over in an art piece she is working on with her partner, Peter Buchman. (Some will remember Ms. Magel’s aesthetic from the Watchcase showhouse in Sag Harbor last summer.)

While Mr. Drake’s summers in East Hampton and Bridgehampton are long over, Ms. Magel lives in Sag Harbor year round, going into the city for clients but happily in residence here. She likes the style and taste of the younger generation now finding homes here. They are not interested in the deep-pile sisal and the white-walled, pale-blue-upholstery look that defines so much of their elders’ houses, she said, explaining that their tastes run more to metals, such as brass and wrought iron with black accents, glass, and marble. Herringbone floors have become popular, too, she noted. “It’s a more European aesthetic.”

ARF will open the show and sale with a cocktail party on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m., with a preview hour at 5. Tickets are $150; $250 for the preview. The event will be open to the public on Sunday. Tickets to Saturday night’s benefit are available at arfhamptons.org .

You might say that this edition of The East Hampton Star HomeBook is dedicated to teardowns. 

No, not because any of the houses we are featuring are about to be demolished, or because any of them rose from the ashes of demolition, but because they have survived this 21st-century trend toward extinction.

So, here’s to houses worth saving!

One survivor comes by the word “cottage” historically. Some 200 years old, it rests not far from the ocean in Sagaponack, where most of the other old, salt-air summer cottages that were constructed relatively recently, in the 1940s and 1950s, have been expanded and reconfigured beyond recognition. 

Another is the only house remaining on the South Fork designed by the renowned late architect Andrew Geller. The 1968 Geller house, in Springs, was recently purchased by a television producer and his wife, who respect its playfulness and plan to restore certain aspects of the original that had been altered under previous owners. 

 Then there’s an abode, jammed full of needlework and other artistic handiwork by one of its owners, that started out as a 19th-century barn. Yet another place of interest we feature is what you might call a South Fork folly: Hidden from view — except from the  houses at Ludlow Greens, a subdivision north of the highway in Bridgehampton — it isn’t a house, in fact, but a covered wooden bridge of the kind you may have seen in the Meryl Streep/Clint Eastwood film “The Bridges of Madison County.”

The newest house in this HomeBook is fascinating (among other reasons) as an example of how to make creative use of awkward building lots, as open space dwindles. The architect Blaze Makoid and the landscape designer Jack deLashmet devised a way to make beautiful use of what others had found troublesome: a small lot shaped like a slice of pizza.

In the spirit of good stewardship, we hope you find this issue of HomeBook not just entertaining but inspiring.

Eco-friendly gardens will be the focus of this year’s Garden as Art tour, an annual benefit for Guild Hall. The event begins on Saturday at 9 a.m. with a continental breakfast at Guild Hall and a panel discussion moderated by Edwina von Gal.

The subject of the talk will be similar in theme to the tour, i.e., landscape care that is chemical and pesticide free. Afterward there will be a book signing by the participants: Sean O’Neill, Stephen Orr, Eric Fleisher, Diane Lewis, and Paul Tukey.

The tour will take in five private gardens, three in East Hampton and two on North Haven, among them the gardens of the artist David Salle and the architect Fred Stelle. In addition, there will be opportunities to consult with landscape professionals about toxin-free practices.

Tickets start at $125 for the tour ($100 for museum members) and increase to include a cocktail party the night before the tour at a private house and a lunch on the day of the tour. Tickets are available at give.guildhall.org/garden.

The Southampton Historical Museum will hold its annual house tour on Saturday at houses throughout Southampton Village and beyond. Now in its fifth year, the tour will include several houses as well as St. Andrew’s Church of the Dunes, the Thomas Halsey Homestead, and the 1708 House inn, which will also serve refreshments.

Of particular note is a house in Shinnecock Hills, designed in 1896 by Katharine Cotheal Budd, a student of William Merritt Chase at his Shinnecock Summer School of Art. Budd’s cottage was part of an enclave of buildings housing the school’s artists that became known as the Art Village. The original design included plots for 15 cottages and a windmill to supply water.

A windmill on the Budd property today has been converted into a guest house, and it is not clear whether it was related to the original windmill, which Cynthia V.A. Schaffner and Lori Zabar described in a 2010 article for Winterthur Portfolio as thatch-covered and likely inspired by the Shinnecock Indian tribe’s traditional wigwams.

In that article, Ms. Schaffner and Ms. Zabar wrote that the school was a natural extension of Chase’s activites at the Art Students League, where he was already working on importing the French tradition of painting outside to the American landscape. Many of his city students followed the artist east to the school, which was one of the first significant summer schools devoted to plein-air painting in the United States, according to the Parrish Art Museum website. It was funded by Samuel L. Parrish and Annie DeCamp Hegeman Porter at the suggestion of Janet Ralston Chase Hoyt. Chase hosted dozens of painters and artistic souls at the school from 1891 to 1902.

The property on this weekend’s tour is set amid the rolling hills from which the area takes its name. The house, while updated, keeps much of the feeling of those early summer colony houses, with diamond-paned windows to catch breezes from all directions, multi-peaked roofs, and a low-slung roofed porch.

Once owned by Francesco Scavullo, the famous fashion photographer, the house’s decor mixing contemporary with antiques so charmed the current owners that they asked to buy all of the interior contents as part of the 1995 sale. The Edelman family, who still own the property, have since updated it but have kept it in a similar spirit.

Other houses on the tour include a mammoth beachfront mansion on the far end of Meadow Lane, set on nine acres between Shinnecock Bay and the Atlantic for sweeping aquatic views. The 17,000-square-foot interior has several wings and viewing perches. In addition to its various sitting rooms and living spaces, there are eight guest bedrooms, two rooms for staff, a home theater, art room, yoga room, and gym. While the exterior is that of a traditional Shingle Style summer cottage, the interior is decorated with mid-century and contemporary European and American furnishings and artwork.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is a more diminutive village cottage in a subdivision made in 1914 by D. Frank Osborne. It is likely the first house built within it. It boasts a four-square plan made popular in the early 20th century by retailers such as Sears Roebuck, which sold them as kits with pre-cut materials that could be constructed on site. A four-square house listed in a 1916 catalog is priced at $1,290.

In its current form, the cedar-shingled cottage has a full front porch with round columns, a side-set main entrance, and double-hung windows. The owner, who is a well-known designer in New York City, was attracted to the house’s light when he purchased the property in 2008. He renovated and restored it, keeping as many historic details intact as possible, including the original windows.

Of the more familiar public spaces, the Thomas Halsey Homestead is the oldest as well as the oldest house in Southampton. It was built around 1666 on the property of one of the area’s original English settlers. It is part of the historical museum properties and has antique tools and furniture inside along with an exhibit devoted to the Shinnecock Indian Nation. The 1708 house may date even further back, and there were certainly dwellings that pre-dated it on the property. Local lore has it that colonists may have met in the basement of the building, which has been restored and is now a boutique hotel. It will be open for tours and will also serve refreshments.

St. Andrew’s Dune Church was originally a life-saving station and was donated as a church in 1879. The non-denominational church and its 11 Tiffany windows managed to survive the 1938 Hurricane, and the building was recently restored and moved to accommodate rising seas. Its summer services are organized by Southampton’s Episcopal church.

The tour lasts from 1 to 4:30 p.m. with a champagne reception following, sponsored by Sant Ambroeus Restaurant. Tickets are $95 in advance and $110 the day of the tour and can be purchased at southamptonhistoricalmuseum.org and at the museum gift shop in the Rogers Mansion.

Purple is the darnedest color. It attracts us like bees to a honeypot. But get it home and it is nearly impossible to find a spot where it fits in. 

After spending entirely too much time on this conundrum I’m coming to the conclusion that purple works well on a small scale or in a large park-like setting. But not in the smaller domestic properties in which most of us live and garden.

The source of this soul-searching is a glorious 25-year-old purple-leaved redbud, Cercis canadensis Forest Pansy. For 24 years of its life in my garden a smattering of purple foliage peeked out from behind a large oak covered with a dramatic climbing hydrangea. It was charming.

The oak departed last winter. Now Forest Pansy is front-and-center, flourishing and ravishing in the additional sunlight. And I am growing to loathe it. If this keeps up much longer, I fear the chain saw will be called in.

The problem is that even though it is surrounded by green trees and shrubs in a variety of textures and flowers, and flowering shrubs are nearby, nothing can compete with it or subdue it. The impact of the purple foliage is so overpowering that it blinds you to the overall garden and everything else within your line of sight.

Transplant it to the sunny edge of a woodland on a slope extending for acres (and yes, there is such a spot in Georgica), bisected with a wide grassy strolling path, and Forest Pansy would have found its perfect home. This is how redbuds grow in nature, and the novelty of purple foliage would be a good visual diversion. It’s all a matter of scale.

In similar fashion, purple-beech trees meld into the landscape of sunny park-like expanses. Plant them in smaller, more constricted settings, and they appear gloomy and funereal.

Short of removing it, we will prune it this coming winter when it is dormant. Will this work? Only time will tell.

But the allure of purple foliage continues to seduce. Most gardeners say, I once grew Forest Pansy, but it died. Mine seems almost like an aberration.  However, a new cultivar, Merlot, has been introduced recently that is said to be more robust. If anyone is growing it here, I would love to see it and hear how it is doing. A better choice for the domestic garden, probably, would be Ruby Falls, a weeping, compact redbud. This would easily fit into a mixed border of shrubs and perennials. Better yet, it would make an excellent focal point planted as a pair at the top of a staircase or entrance to a garden.

A new Styrax japonicus with purple leaves is just entering the U.S. market, and I for one have lined up to buy it. If it is like Forest Pansy and outgrows its space in another 25 years, I won’t be around to decide what to do.  In the meantime, there will be years of pleasure from it.

I was mesmerized by one in Normandy several years ago and have not been able to erase its image from my head. Yes, the garden was very large, the grassy paths wide and long, so Styrax japonicus Purple Dress attracted attention but wasn’t overwhelming.

Before Purple Dress made its introduction here, an even better form out of the Netherlands began attracting attention. It’s called Evening Light. The first crop is about ready for sale at Broken Arrow Nursery in Hamden, Conn., and small plants are listed by Gossler Farms in Oregon and Wayside Gardens. All are mail-order nurseries.

Purchasing the best form of a plant always pays dividends, but is even more important when flamboyant dark red or purple foliage is involved. Drive around and Japanese red maples and purple plums, Prunus cerasifera, are everywhere; it is the rare one that doesn’t make you grind your teeth in distress. But the maples are probably grown from seed, and the color has been degraded. The plums are a ragtag lot, mildewed, diseased, and sickly looking.

If you are looking for a Japanese red maple in local garden centers, take a critical eye with you. The time to look is June, when the foliage is fresh and most vivid. As the season advances the color may fade and look tired. I prefer to buy Japanese maples from specialist mail-order growers who propagate from good quality stock plants.    

Nothing is more elegant than a good form of Japanese maple, but a possible alternative is the elderberry, Sambucus nigra Black Lace. It has finely dissected leaves in dark purple-black that are said to maintain their color over a long season.

Other shrubs with good purple foliage that work well in borders are the smoketree and native ninebark. The smoketree (Cotinus coggygria) cultivars Velvet Cloak and Royal Purple have almost black leaves through most of the summer when given full sun, and are a spectacular rich red-purple in autumn. The ninebark, Physocarpus opulifolius Diablo, also has red-purple leaves in full sun. Both can be pruned nearly to the ground to promote vivid new growth.

A good shade tree that created a lot of buzz in Europe is the katsura, Cercidiphyllum japonicum Red Fox. It has heart-shaped leaves somewhat like those of redbuds and is columnar, rather than spreading. Its leaves are a more intense purple when grown in full sun, although they gradually fade to bluish-green by midsummer. A specimen of Red Fox is growing at LongHouse Reserve along Peggy’s Path.

The Japanese barberry, Berberis thunbergii Concorde, is a treasure and a keeper. The leaves are nearly black, with ruby highlights when backlit by the sun. My mature plant, on the north-facing side of the house where it receives limited sun, is just under 18 inches high and 3 feet across. At most it gets an occasional snip here and there to keep the compact mound perfectly shaped. What’s almost better is the deer have ignored it, while most of its companion plants must be protected by netting.

In contrast, I recently ripped out Bagatelle, another compact and highly recommended barberry, which didn’t begin to hold up in comparison.

Concorde would respond to shearing to be used as a low hedge or an element in a knot garden.

It is the rare gardener who does not succumb to impulse purchases, and plants with purple foliage are probably at or near the top of the list. So relax and enjoy them. Part of the pleasure is finding the right location and companion plants. And then there is always the chainsaw.

“Since the 1950s, American families have gotten smaller while homes have nearly doubled in size.”    —Yale University Architectural Team

With no apparent slowdown in the making of megamansions, a book has just come out that tempts us back to the days when small really was beautiful. It is “Alfred A. Scheffer’s Beach Hampton Houses, 1941 to 1965,” written by Robert Hefner, the East Hampton Village director of historic services.

The prose and photographs document the small-scale, refined adaptations of Cape Cod-style architecture that were produced by someone known as the dean of East Hampton architects, who died in 1976. In an era of small houses, Schef, as he was called, showed how cozy can be luxury enough and summer extravagance can be just living, pool-less, within walking distance of blue water and white sand.

An architecture graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Scheffer first practiced in New York City, designing Tudor and Georgian houses in Westchester County and the UpIsland suburb of Douglaston. At the Barbour restaurant, close to his office at 54th Street and Fifth Avenue, he became friendly with the owner, Ella Barbour. She and her husband, a bond trader, had gotten interested in “Beach Hampton,” which was envisioned by the New York City developer R. B. Allen as a community of modest summer cottages in the Amagansett dunes.

For middle-class people “a weekend vacation house in the Hamptons was a new concept, made possible by the state parkways built by Robert Moses in the 1930s,” Mr. Hefner writes.

By the late ’30s, Mr. Allen had assembled more than 200 acres between the ocean beach and Bluff Road and the Montauk Highway, bounded west and east by Beach and Napeague Lanes. Mrs. Barbour soon bought land for a beach club, creating, Mr. Hefner says, “the first Manhattan restaurant to open a branch in the Hamptons.”

Its modest building, which Scheffer designed with his then-partner Lester Tichy, was “one of the earliest modernist buildings on Long Island,” but it was lost at the end of its first season when the 1938 Hurricane poured water over the dunes as far up as Route 27.

With typical Hamptonesque optimism in the face of near-certain future hurricanes, Mrs. Barbour and Mr. Allen each commissioned Scheffer houses. He eventually designed 15 for Mrs. Barbour and her children, four in Beach Hampton and others in the New York suburbs. Eventually the Barbours encouraged Scheffer to build a house for himself near theirs. He also designed three model houses of from 560 to 920 square feet for Mr. Allen, and about 25 Beach Hampton structures in all. Often built on no more foundation than concrete slabs, some of the houses were started in April and habitable by Memorial Day.

All were nuanced. Mr. Hefner expertly identifies “well-studied proportions” with no applied ornament save decorative shutters, low, “ground-hugging” designs to fit into the dune landscape, and outstretching, shaded terraces. Though the exteriors were traditional, the interiors show how Scheffer “treated a traditional form with a modem aesthetic.”

The houses often included expansive two-story cathedral living rooms with exposed beams, large fireplaces, and walls of unpainted, weathered brick or knotty pine. The layouts were informal, with dining areas instead of dining rooms and small bedrooms. Scheffer “created a refined interior by giving much attention to subtle details” like the proportions of the rooms, simple fireplace mantels, and built-in bookcases.

The book, with historic photos, new ones by Jeff Heatley, and research by John Gibson, was commissioned by Greg Zwirko, Scheffer’s nephew, who spent summers at the Scheffer house in Amagansett and was Scheffer’s “apprentice” for seven years until the architect’s death. He continues the practice as Zwirko and Ortmann Architects.

Copies of the book are available for $71.70; an e-book version is $9.99. Links to both are at www.alfredascheffer.com. BookHampton is expected to have copies around March 1.

All but a handful of Scheffer’s Beach Hampton houses have been torn down or modified, but a number are still intact, including three built between 1959 and 1965 on Sandpiper Lane. As the postwar economy improved, Scheffer started doing larger houses in the Hamptons. They warrant a book of their own before they, too, are demolished. Altogether, Scheffer built some 200 houses on Long Island. But the Beach Hampton ones, Mr. Hefner shows, reveal the essence of a master.

It is over a year since The Star last reported on progress at the Thomas Moran house, the national historic landmark opposite Town Pond in East Hampton that is being restored, pillar by post, month by unhurried month, to its former somewhat unorthodox glory.

A great deal of progress has been made inside the 1885 building, which visitors to Main Street aren’t able to see, though so much work still remains, both inside and out, that to say the undertaking is even one-third finished would probably be stretching it.

One of the most crucial challenges of the entire operation — getting the front of the wobbly structure shored up before another Sandy could take a crack at it — was met during the fall. That enabled the structural phase of the project to get under way, starting with a new foundation. Along with the floors and walls, it has now been leveled and reinforced.

Most recently, workers installed a sprinkler system — “a very big deal,” said Robert Hefner, East Hampton Village’s director of historic services, who heads the restoration team along with Richard Barons, executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society and the Thomas Moran Trust. “They had to drill through a lot of floor joists to run the pipes through,” Mr. Hefner explained. Infrastructure for air-conditioning is also now in place, along with ducts for heating, all of which was put in over the past few weeks with “everybody working together.”

Moran assembled his house higgledy-piggledy, adding features here and there as the years passed. It was not electrified until 1900. The original wall switches are still in place and will stay there,  Mr. Hefner said, as unmistakable artifacts. So will some exposed plumbing.

Though renowned as a painter of the American West, Moran lived on and off in East Hampton for about 35 years and did much of his work here in the vast front room. A major feature of the Studio, as the house was and still is known, was the oversized window positioned on the room’s north wall, affording requisite north light. The artist, whose custom it was to wander the streets of his Manhattan neighborhood looking for buildings being demolished and make off with whatever struck his fancy, is believed to have taken the big window, and a smaller one to the side, from a commercial building at Broadway and 22nd Street, where he also appropriated his front doors.

The large window had been used for display, with a cross-hatched transom above it. Moran reversed their position, putting the window above and the transom below, a decision that caused some grief for the restorers. “The transom wasn’t built to be underneath, it was built to shed water,” Mr. Hefner said. “So there was a lot of rot from water damage.” 

The two windows were removed from the house last summer before it was raised and stabilized. Three weeks ago the window frames returned, as good as old and better, thanks to the craftsmen Adam Galecki and Jim Field. “A lot of repair was needed,” Mr. Hefner said. Mr. Galecki patched, Mr. Field glazed and painted.

The upside-down transom is back on the wall, still upside down. All that is missing there now is a new six-by-six piece of glass and two leaded-glass fanlights, not yet back from restoration in Eastport, at the windows’ top.

The otherwise smooth progress had one unexpected hiccup recently. The house’s exterior trim, of Atlantic white cedar, which was being milled in Rhode Island, was lost in May in a fire there, and has not been easily replaceable. “It’s a great wood, but not so easy to get,” Mr. Hefner said.

Shingling, which is coming from a mill in faraway British Columbia, has been delayed until the new trim is ready. The plan now is to have the front of the house shingled by late summer or early fall, at which time, Mr. Barons said, the Moran Trust, which has an ongoing campaign to pay for the work and provide an endowment, is planning a big fund-raiser.

   Barbara Feldman, an East Hampton interior designer, has found her calling, and it turns out to be a composite of her previous careers. A former designer of commercial and medical interiors, a real estate agent, and a house stager, she reinvented herself not long ago after analyzing the demographics of the South Fork and realizing that a plethora of young families live here. “They need a different kind of design,” she said.

    While many young families own second homes here and “want to get out of the pool and sit on the couch” without worry, “they still want a stylish house,” she said. Her concentration now is on creating “kid and pet-friendly homes” that incorporate materials that are hypoallergenic, antimicrobial, durable, nontoxic, safe, and green. But in doing so, she said she had not compromised her aesthetics. “Otherwise the whole thing would be meaningless.”

     There was just one problem. When she was designing “very styled, high-end, V.I.P. hospital facilities,” she was all too aware that most materials that meet health requirements were “really ugly.”

    In hospitals “you have to deal with some of the unpleasantness of life,” she said. “Vomit, urine, blood, Betadine. . . . It was a challenge to make [rooms] look beautiful. . . hands were tied by unsophisticated technology at the time.” But that was the ’90s. Fast-forward to the present, and the good news is that materials have evolved.

     These days, Ms. Feldman spends up to 15 hours a week seeking products — from furniture to carpets to paints and wall coverings — that are nontoxic and can be cleaned with bleach, while also being “beachy chic.” And she has stockpiled an assortment of fabrics to fit most design palettes.    

     “Stains like red wine, mud, mustard, tomato sauce, and chocolate,” are, she said, the banes of everyday life. However, with cutting-edge fabrics, a swipe with bleach will remove an offending blot (not the color or pattern) while killing germs at the same time. “When puppies piddle you get a nice big yellow stain,” she said. “Not with this stuff.” Many of her products are also odor-resistant.

    Most of the new fabrics were primarily conceived for the hospitality industry; while attractive, they are tough. Ms. Feldman can even quote the scores they get on something called the Weezenbeck test, which measures durability by how long it takes to destroy a material. A good rating, she said, starts at 10,000. Most of the fabrics she uses score between 12,000 and 60,000, some going up to 100,000. About the only wear and tear she can’t guarantee against is cat scratching, but even that, she said, can be minimized.

    Antimicrobial properties are “built into the yarn itself,” and she provides upholstery fills that don’t carry allergens like mold or dust mites. Most are also extremely flame retardant, she said.

    Her design work is not all about materials, however. She also focuses on child safety, finding and suggesting furniture that is stable or has rounded corners, and “mechanisms that will keep them from getting into cabinets with cleaning agents or sharp objects.”

     With calls coming in from prospective clients and builders these days, Ms. Feldman is convinced she’s onto something with wide appeal. “The future has arrived,” she said.

    Gardeners will understand when I say I was elated last Thursday afternoon when it seemed the snow might actually accumulate. That was not to be. The so-called Sunday-night storm was a bust, too. It has been a week of the worst of all possible worlds for our gardens: temperatures plunged with no renewal of the poor man’s compost, snow.

    Most people have had their fill of snow this winter, but our gardens would fare much better if they remained covered by a blanket of snow until the jet stream changes and the cycle of freeze-thaw gives way to stable, moderating temperatures. 

    In all my years gardening in East Hampton I don’t recall a winter with as many days as this year with temperatures under 25 degrees, let alone around 15 for days on end. But since January the thick layer of snow insulated and protected plants by maintaining the soil at a constant temperature.

    Yes, many gardens have suffered damage, with trees and branches breaking under the weight of recent heavy, wet snow. We’ve all probably lost some trees or shrubs. I certainly have. People who select plants that push the hardiness zone may have lost more.

    A tip for limiting damage to conifers is to try to grow those with only a single trunk. Arborvitae tend to come with two trunks; you can provide yourself with some insurance if you tell your landscaper you want single trunks only.  They won’t be happy, but after all it is your place and you are paying. If the snow has bent but not broken trunks and branches, cabling can salvage them.

    Witch hazels are the flowering workhorses of winter. Perhaps they opened a week to 10 days late and the flowers curled up on frigid days, but otherwise they have been veritable flowering machines. They’ve been in bloom for two months and show no sign of quitting. The late-flowering Arnold Promise is just opening, and as soon as it warms up a little, will fill the air with fragrance. 

    Some of the earliest snowdrops, crocuses, and hellebores were just opening or had plump buds when the snow arrived in January. Two weeks ago when the snow began to melt and the temperature warmed up briefly, the flowers opened fully in less than a day. It is a mystery to me how plants continue to develop while they are covered with snow. A new crop of snowdrops and crocuses pushed out over the last 10 days and will be pristine when they open, given a brief exposure to improved weather.

    Without the insulating effect of snow, desiccating strong winds and wide changes in temperature could make March and April more treacherous for our gardens than the winter. Perhaps the thoroughly wet soil may ward off damage to trees from winds during any cold spells. But heaving soil bodes ill for perennials.

    I read once that the best thing you can do to help your garden is to leave home in winter. That might well apply this year to March. Try to avoid stomping on the beds. If in doubt, wait.

    If you didn’t have a chance to compost your beds last fall, that would be a good March chore as soon as the snow melts. We never seem to make enough of our own compost and supplement it with that from the dump, which has worked very well. I’d be reluctant to use it on the vegetable garden without seeing test results first.

    The rule of thumb is to plant pea seeds on St. Patrick’s Day. That might be optimistic this year.

    If you did lose some trees and shrubs, this is the perfect time to redesign and seek alternatives. Check the websitesfor Rare Find Nursery in New  Jersey and Broken Arrow Nursery in Connecticut; they are filled with goodies.  Each makes a great (but long) day trip. That makes the garden happy keeping you out of town, and makes you happy finding new and exciting plants to fill those open spaces.

    Spring may officially be only three weeks away, but take your cues from the actual weather before heading out to the garden.

    My husband planted Jerusalem artichokes in his East Hampton vegetable garden last fall. He ordered them from an online catalog that a friend had recommended. They looked like pieces of ginger root — that light brown color and that gnarled shape. My husband made an area for them along the north side of the garden fence, and then he planted the tubers about three inches down in the ground. He installed a mesh barrier about six inches deep around the area to prevent underground traveling creatures from eating the tubers. And that was it.

    Then, he let the Jerusalem artichokes do their thing down there in the earth. Harvesting and eating wasn’t going to come around till much later — another whole year.

    There’s a lot of “my husband” and “he” in the planting of the Jerusalem artichokes because the garden is his domain, a habitat of his own creation, in which he is comfortable and patient. He does all the masterminding, planting, and nurturing. To grow anything at all is very wonderful and impressive to someone like me, with a brownish-black thumb and a self-defeating attitude on things like remembering to water. How can I hope to grow anything — ever — a pea or a bean or a pepper (or a better attitude), when the whole process towers as a totally impossible feat? So I’m generally admiring of my husband’s vegetable garden without too much of a specific focus on details. Meaning, without too much of a focus on the actual plants. I like that they’re there, but someone else is the someone giving the plants the attention they need, and so, un-needed on that one, I turn to other needy areas of our life.

    With the Jerusalem artichokes, however, it was different. I started watching because I became fascinated by how fast and strong the plants were coming up, how totally vital the visible stalks were — vital and visible and reaching up as the tubers kept mysteriously hidden below. It was hard to miss them, hard not to get curious. “Look boys,” I said to my kids back in the spring, “those are the Jerusalem artichokes your dad planted. Look how fast they’re growing.”

    Around the end of June, the above-ground stalks of the plants had become about four feet high. They were strong and straight with deep green, delicately pointy, slightly sticky leaves. And they kept on growing. Strong, straight, and deeply green-leaved, they kept it up, passing five, seven, nine feet tall.

    As the summer progressed, buds appeared way up at the top, and since even I knew that the part of the plant you eat is the tuber, and that the tubers are underground, I knew it to be true when my husband said flowers would be coming. I looked every day thinking surely, it’s late July — aren’t the flowers coming yet? But they weren’t. The stalks kept going, strong, straight, and deeply green-leaved as ever they had grown themselves to be, past 10 feet to 11 or 12, the tallest even taller.

    “Look boys, the Jerusalem artichokes are really growing like crazy,” I said, pointing out the very obvious to a none­theless receptive audience. After all, what we were seeing was impressive. And then, as August came, and I turned the calendar over, and said not a word to my summer-enthralled children but knew in my grown-up heart that August means summer can do nothing but end, I started thinking maybe the flowers would never really come. Maybe the buds, which looked shapely but firmly closed, would not open after all. I think I was trying to shield myself from disappointment. It’s hard to care about something you can’t control.

    But at the beginning of September, after Labor Day, at the end of that rainy rainy week (remember it?), just as the boys were overtaken by the blend of anticipation/anxiety/bummer/curiosity that is their collective back-to-school feeling (plus squeezing their feet into shoes, unknown all summer), the Jerusalem artichoke flowers began to bloom. They were very modest at first, just opening, yellow sunflower type blooms, bobbing up at the top of those super-tall stalks, starting to nod hello to the sun. But as the week progressed, they opened in bright yellow profusion, the flowers surprisingly delicate, the leaves pointy, the centers yellowy brown.

    By mid-September, there were lots and lots of flowers, not just at the top but starting from about halfway up the stalks (always looking up, I hadn’t noticed those buds). They waved in the wind and winked in the sun, and I felt totally confronted with the strength of the life of those beautiful stalks and schooled by the perfect progression with which they were living it.

    I had thought the Jerusalem artichoke flowers would be pretty and satisfying, but I didn’t know they would be glorious. And neither did my husband, even as he was the planter and the grower and the mastermind of the vegetable garden. We didn’t know the actuality of the joy the flowers would bring, the delight. And the story isn’t half told! There’s still the harvesting and the cooking and the eating of the Jerusalem artichokes. I’m expecting them to be good — earthy and satisfying — but who knows what glories I don’t yet know, haven’t imagined, that lie developing in the Jerusalem artichokes.

    Meanwhile, my husband says that we should cut the flowers so that the tubers will grow bigger and better. How I can ever bear to do this, or watch him do it, I don’t know. How to sacrifice the splendor of them, even for growth? But a cut flower bouquet put in a coffee can container and left at a friend’s back door as an early fall gift is the perfect solution for a situation like this. Outside to inside; our habitat to yours, a stage in the story of those Jerusalem artichokes.