Centuries ago there was tulipomania. More recently and on a larger stage, there was the dot-com bubble, followed by the housing bubble. We know what happened to them.

    Gardeners now seem caught up in a hydrangea frenzy. There are mopheads, lacecaps, and Annabelle types, not to mention oakleaf and Japanese panicle hydrangeas. For the truly smitten, there are Japanese mountain hydrangeas (serrata), villosas, and other more tender species and varieties.

Hydrangeas, from left, are the new cultivar Incrediball in mid-June and in late July; a double-flowered lace cap, and Hayes Starburst, a double-flowered PeeGee.

    I’m as besotted as anyone. A quick tally of my garden came up with 15 varieties, some in multiples, plus three different climbers. How did it happen, and will it all come crashing down?

    The how is easy. Hydrangeas are traditional seaside shrubs, providing a splash of color in the middle of summer. They have always been popular on eastern Long Island, especially the blue mophead, H. macrophylla Nikko Blue. That’s the one that if you prune it too late, there are no flowers the following year. Conscientious landscapers take hedge shears in hand immediately after Labor Day in a decapitation ritual.

    Two white hydrangeas are also longtime mainstays here: the native H. arborescens Annabelle and the Japanese H. paniculata, both PeeGee (short for paniculata Grandiflora) and Tardiva.

    During the past 25 years the number of cultivars entering the market has grown dramatically and seems to be gathering even more momentum. Some trends: repeat blooming bushes that flower on both old and new wood for extended blooming, more compact bushes that do not require radical pruning, double flowers, a wider range of colors, and, of course, improvements, like an Annabelle that doesn’t flop.

    Can we work our way through an overabundance of choices? Ideal would be regional public gardens creating collections and conducting trials, like the EarthKind rose trials at the New York Botanical Garden, to evaluate and compare the many new cultivars against traditional gold standards. Trade associations often finance rose trials; if only hydrangea growers would do the same.

    Looking at container-grown flowering bushes at garden centers is an unreliable way to select plants. Last week, checking out the nurseries in this area, I saw too many varieties that I believe were misidentified. Also the soil used in container-grown shrubs tends to color the flowers pink; after a year or so in the ground, they are most likely to be blue, the prevailing color in our acid soils. However, minus aluminum in the soil the flowers will be shades of pink (add aluminum sulfate to the soil in that case, if you wish).

    Reference books (especially “Hydrangeas for American Gardens” by Michael A. Dirr) are of some, but limited, help as many of the plants in garden centers were introduced after the books were published. Do you wonder if the hydrangea bubble is near the bursting point? (Seriously, take your smartphone or iPad and Google, and look at the plants that interest you. At least that should give you a photo and basic information; perhaps even gardeners’ comments.)

    However, the best way to decide what hydrangeas you might want for your garden is to visit other gardens and hope the plants are labeled or the owner knows their names. Europeans are mad for hydrangeas, and there are large collections and festivals in England, France, and Belgium. Corinne Mallet has put together probably the world’s largest collection, upward of 1,200 taxa (species and cultivars) over the last 30 years at Jardin Shamrock, a nonprofit garden in Varengeville sur Mer in Normandy. It is an astonishing feat.

    I cannot recommend specific mopheads or lacecaps, except to say the Bluebird and Blue Billow lacecaps are reliable and integrate well with other trees and shrubs in my shady garden. For hedges and mass plantings of mopheads, it’s difficult to get past the newish, repeat blooming Endless Summer or Nikko Blue. A quick look through Dr. Dirr’s book illustrates dozens of luscious alternatives in better colors.

    Mopheads seem much more susceptible to late frosts than lacecaps. I snip off just the flower heads when they begin to look tatty in November or December, but wait until late April or even early May before pruning them. A late frost can kill the flowering tips of exposed ends.

    Aside from its tendency to flop, H. arborescens Annabelle is among the most elegant of hydrangeas. A new cultivar, Incrediball, lives up to its name. The circular flower heads can be 16 inches in diameter and the stems remain upright. Like Annabelle, its flowers are lime green early in the season, maturing to white, and then changing back to lime.

 The jury is still out: Are the heads too large and the stems too straight? Only time will tell. Next year make up your own mind with a visit to the Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden behind Clinton Academy in East Hampton, where the entrance is banked with them. For comparison, wander over to the small green in front of Ralph Lauren’s RRL shop in the center of the village where Annabelle holds court.

    The panicle hydrangeas are probably the hardiest and toughest of the lot. Unlike others, they flourish in full sun. Popular in tree form as well as multi-stemmed bushes, the softly billowy PeeGee and the pyramidal Tardiva are ubiquitous. Limelight, which received an outstanding rating at a Royal Horticultural Society trial at Wisley, south of London, is growing in popularity. After seeing the double Hayes Starburst in a friend’s garden, I was delighted to find a plant earlier this season at a New England nursery.

    There are a multitude of other selections, including a number whose flowers change to various shades of pink and red. Take advantage of this outpouring of hydrangea cultivars. Get as many as you like and can obtain while the bubble is still intact and growing. A friend is excited by a pink flower edged in white he discovered in a local garden center. I found a groundcover and a purple lacecap online at Wilkerson Mill Gardens (hydrangea.com). The fun is in the process. If they are keepers, great! If not, shovel, prune, and move on.

    Tucked into the front corner of a spacious property in East Hampton Village, where a green lawn edged with a jumble of wild plants spreads down to meet a finger of Hook Pond, is a little old house with timeless charm.

    Like others built here in the 19th century, it was moved to its present site. Old wall and ceiling beams give evidence of its age,

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but it has been custom-fitted to accommodate the owner’s daughter and grandchildren, who spend long vacations there. A parade of thin white starfish, flanked by a child’s drawings and books, decorates a hutch. An old book tucked into a notch in one of the upright beams probably is a child’s work.

    A larger house on the grounds was also moved from elsewhere and totally rebuilt in the 1980s. Both are owned by Patti Kenner, whose friend Mary Emmerling has helped her decorate her houses in true American country style.

    The author of 28 books on decorating and collecting, Ms. Emmerllng, who now makes her home in the Southwest, is a former South Fork resident and shopkeeper. At one time she had a shop in the city, and it was there that she and Ms. Kenner met. For the next several years, Ms. Emmerling collected pieces for Ms. Kenner, slowly amassing the pine hutches, vintage painted furniture, old tables, prints, and textiles that make the little house picture-perfect.

    The furniture is for the most part of honey-colored pine, and many pieces are weathered, pocked with signs of wear. The “half-cupboards,” as Ms. Emmerling calls them (think a hutch without a top), are “just great for storage,” she said.

     Because Ms. Kenner loves flags and the Fourth of July, Ms. Emmerling searched for what she calls “celebration pieces” — Americana, Stars and Stripes, and the like. “I went with a tape measure everywhere,” Ms. Emmerling said, to local shops like Sage Street Antiques in Sag Harbor and the annual antiques shows here.

    “This house had so many little rooms — you didn’t want them all full of little furniture,” Ms. Emmerling said. “You want [pieces] a little bit oversized, but not too much. That wouldn’t fit through the door.”

    This spring, she turned to freshening the small Kenner house for another summer. Through the years, she said, it has undergone “slow, small changes —but basically it remains the same.” 

    Ralph Lauren chintz bedding in one of several bedrooms has an antique blue-and-white look. Lamps are made from old ceramic jugs. Under a bedside table, a carved wooden swan sits on top of a rattan case that looks like it could have been carried by a man wearing a boater. Although the house is clearly lived in, all of the details are in keeping with the decorating theme. Next to the hearth, an old-fashioned broom with a stout stick handle leans against the wall. There is a quartet of Currier and Ives prints and framed needlepoint samplers on the walls. One, articulating “A Good Motto,” is signed “To Violet From Mother on Your 21st Birthday” and dated March 2, 1831. Not all the artwork is vintage or historic, however. There are several modern geometric paintings of beachy scenes.

    In a small sitting room, a cobbler’s bench serves as a coffee table in front of one of the hutches. A 13-star flag, hung vertically, reaches from floor to ceiling, perhaps a dozen feet. A wooden box with vintage green paint is used for storage. Framed old maps of Long Island and of East Hampton are also on the walls. A child’s room contains a child-size four-drawer dresser, which also has marks of its past life, and a dark wooden crib.

    Tall round coffee tables, three-legged “cricket tables” from England, are used in several of the seating areas. “You just can’t find some of this stuff anymore,” Ms. Emmerling said. “I wish these pieces could all talk.”

    Fitted under one wall of the center hall, under a mirror framed in wood, is a trestle table with planed edges that are curved at the front corners rather than square.     The kitchen, although updated, retains a historic feeling. A wooden cutting board on top of a counter hooks over the counter’s edge — evidence of the practicality and ingenuity of a former time. A two-drawer wooden box holds silverware. A trio of small oil paintings on the walls are soft still lifes, and three handwritten ledgers have been framed and hung: of bricks, sold in April and June of 1900, and of butter, from 1806. Over the frames are silhouettes, one of a street scene, another of a cow. A record of hog sales in 1866 is set off by a big, black paper pig.     

    Nine narrow stairs lead to the second floor and an open game room, which is further evidence of family life. Skylights provide ample light for playing pool or tossing darts at a board on a wall. A classic trunk is a coffee table in front of a couch, and a log cabin replica is on a table behind it. Ms. Emmerling calls it the “rainy-day room.”

    Up another five steps what once had been an attic has four single beds and a view of the treetops through a small window. “I just love the four beds together like a bunk room,” Ms. Emmerling said.

    Ms. Emmerling used antique lace to make half curtains throughout the house so those inside could be shielded but still glimpse the sky and the outdoors. Outside, an old-fashioned dooryard garden has hostas and ferns under flowering trees, with lilies of the valley peeking through on a recent visit. The view from the dining room draws the eye toward the pond. A rusted anchor lies half-buried in the grass. Just outside the dining room, a swimming pool and a nearby wisteria-topped pergola shades a cast-iron garden set and an old flag. Purple martin houses on tall posts edge the woods.    

    A resident or summer visitor here for 40 years, Ms. Emmerling has decorated 10 East End houses, and had houses of her own in Bridgehampton and Sagaponack. She is working on three new books, still decorating, and working as an organizer. Of her signature style, Ms. Emmerling said, “I took the words ‘early American’ and updated them.”

    “I just love cottages. . . . You can open the windows and let the breeze blow through.”      

As they had with their studio and living space in Manhattan’s Chelsea, G. Phillip Smith and Douglas Thompson were planning to start from scratch when they built a house for themselves on the East End. The partners, who met at the Columbia School of Architecture, spent two years looking for a suitable lot, where they could exercise their Modernist sensibility in a tranquil setting.  

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The property they found, on Spring Close Highway near an agricultural reserve and a 20-acre horse farm as well as the Long Island train tracks, had been part of the Bistrian farm. Two outbuildings, a tractor barn and a small hay barn that had been converted to a cottage, were to be torn down. But, over time, Mr. Thompson told a recent visitor, they “fell in love” with the idea of integrating the old buildings with the new designs they are noted for. It turned out to be a 15-year process.

Today, the old buildings have been restored as part of a 4,500-square-foot house with expanses of glass, interwoven and cantilevered levels, and a glass tower. There is a studio where staff members can come and work and comfortable places where friends and family can share the architects’ retreat. The last three years were a push to get it all finished.

As Alastair Gordon, an architectural historian and former writer for The East Hampton Star, explained, the property became “something like a laboratory workshop in slow design, a place where the architects could try out new ideas, change directions, and practice living with the results.”

The ground level of the house, in what was once the tractor barn, has the architecture studio and a library. A separate entryway was created, with a poured, light concrete floor and one of the several stairways in the house, which leads to the main floor and to a glass “stair” tower, which the couple think of as a silo.

The smaller building, at the other end of the house, has a sleeping loft instead of a hayloft and a summer kitchen, which is used to prepare meals for eating alfresco.

The property had belonged to George Schulte, a furniture restorer and appraiser and, later, to Peter Stone, a writer for theater, television, and movies. The barn, which had living spaces on a second floor, was Mr. Schulte’s workshop for many years, and Mr. Stone used it to house the actors who were often his guests.

Most of the windows face south, which, Mr. Smith said, makes the house “responsive to natural light all year round.” Skylights and a large A-shaped window provide the three main floor bedrooms with light and air. The house also has nautical touches: One of the bedrooms is like the cabin of a boat and opens onto a small deck through a Dutch door. A stairwell has a rope handrail.

Making use of the natural surroundings, the partners designed a sitting area on the living floor with a window adjacent to a huge juniper. It is one of several places where the house seems to be in the trees. Mr. Thompson and Mr. Smith had been in Japan as well as Malaysia, which explains some of the Asian touches in the house. A platform with a tatami mat for reading or relaxing is an example.

On the living floor, the ceilings had been 7 feet 4 inches high; they were raised to 10 feet and the windows were made larger. There is a folding wall and screen system on one side of the dining area that faces the front courtyard; it can be raised and lowered by remote control. At the other end of the room, a steel bookcase with a frosted plexiglass back is both a screen and light fixture.

Frank Lloyd Wright would approve of the look of the house, which, similar to the partners’ New York quarters, is spare, almost spartan. “Keeping the house uncluttered, helps keep the mind uncluttered,” Mr. Smith said. Proving the point, all the kitchen equipment is in drawers (even the microwave oven) under the countertop, which may come as a surprise to the uninitiated. The counter is made of precast concrete reinforced by rebar. An extra, pop-up sink in the counter is semi-concealed.

There are three ways to get into the house, with a staircase off a sitting area near the kitchen, another off the kitchen itself. At the top level, it is possible to cross from one end of the house to the other over a roof terrace that connects a guest bedroom to the stairs leading to the kitchen and living floor, all of which creates a loop.

While the house has become a signature of the partners’ work, another building on the site almost steals the show. It is a 200-square-foot, two-story pool house with a sod roof that the men describe as more tea house or garden folly. (The Smith and Thompson office building in New York also has a green roof, and the firm is doing other projects with sod.)

The pool house, at the edge of the property, can be seen, along with the swimming pool and a grass yard, from the different levels and rooms of the house. Mr. Smith said it was a retreat for writing or reflecting — and was also nice for napping, although it has an outdoor living room and indoor and outdoor fireplaces. Second floor shutters guard against rain and sun, while a composting toilet testifies to the partners’ environmental consciousness. Two huge evergreens, former Christmas trees planted by the Schultes, loom to one side.

The pool house was designed in keeping with Norwegian construction principles to support the weight of the four-inch-thick sod, which was taken from the property. The architects constructed the building themselves with the help of apprentices and interns, using Spanish cedar for the shutters and Philippine mahogany for dividers. Leftover mahogany became the main house’s dining room table, which the partners also built themselves.

While only an acre, several elements combine to make the property seem much larger: The house is at the back of the lot and there are woods to one side. The northern boundary is marked by a Corten steel wall, which will rust and seal itself eventually. As it blends into the landscape, it will also add dimension, they said.

Mr. Smith and Mr. Thompson wanted to live in a house that “respected where we are in nature, our vernal bond,” one that also evoked the area’s agricultural past and reflected the open ocean, about a mile away. The house now can accommodate some 12 guests, and, given the new spaces, the pool house, and the woods, not to mention the beach, the hosts have fulfilled their dream.

    In any other format or site, a container show is pretty much what you would expect it to be, a lovely but restrained affair. The LongHouse Reserve, however, is anything but typical. Its container show burst out of its confined format practically from the beginning.

    The fifth “Planters: On+Off the Ground” will take place on Saturday from 4:30 to 6 p.m. with the winners announced at 6 p.m. Last year’s winners included Hope Sandrow’s first place entry of a single cactus under a bell jar bound with rope and titled “Endangered Species.” Geoffrey Nimmer’s “People’s Choice Award” winning entry looked like something hacked out of a rain forest with a machete by an artful native plant designer. The effect was stunning.

    “It gets more and more imaginative each year,” said Dianne Benson, LongHouse’s president, known more familiarly as Dianne B. to the gardening cognoscenti. “Now, in the spirit of the ideal invitational competition, the participants are trying harder and harder to come up with something original, or so unusual that it does go one step beyond.”

    She said the emphasis has become more on the visual than the botanical, “an artistic exercise, rather than horticultural exercise in keeping with the spirit of LongHouse. Its gardens are not traditional, but they’re classic in their own way. LongHouse is not a botanical garden or arboretum. It’s not scientific. The stress is on the visual and artistic parts rather than the horticultural parts.”

    In the entries, sometimes it’s the containers that take center stage, sometimes it’s the plants. Often there can be elaborate installations that take days to put together. “Entrants are given free rein beginning Monday morning. They have all week long to do installations. They may arrive with the entry completely full-blown or create it all there. By Friday evening they have to be finished.” When LongHouse opens on Saturday at 2 p.m. they will be complete; they will remain on view through July 28.

    Ms. Benson said the momentum for the invitation-only event has been growing every year. LongHouse tries to limit entries to 30 people each year, although that number can grow to accommodate new faces and prior participants who offer to return.

    Craig Socia, a garden designer from East Hampton, will be a first-time participant this year. “He’s doing something very exciting using upside-down trees and putting plants in the tree limbs and trunk. It will be spectacular,” Ms. Benson said.

    This year’s panel of three judges includes Ina Garten, April Gornik, and Fred Stelle. In the past there has been just one judge and some decisions were controversial. “When Martha Stewart judged, everyone agreed with her.” In subsequent years, that was not always the case. “This year it’s completely different. We will have three judges and the people’s choice award, which was added last year. Now, everybody is helping decide,” Ms. Benson said.

    The judges all come from different backgrounds, Mr. Stelle is an architect, Ms. Gornik is an artist and a dedicated gardener, Ms. Garten has focused her career on food and entertaining. They will choose ribbon winners and honorable mentions.

    Those who want to vote for the people’s choice award can begin casting ballots at 2 p.m. on Saturday. Admission costs $10 on Saturday until 4:30, and $20 from 4:30 to 6, or $10 for members.

   To what can we attribute the enduring popularity of hostas? They can be likened to the Helen of Troy or Cleopatra of the floral world, seducing non-gardening homeowners and casual and obsessed gardeners alike.

    All this passion for a plant that can be destroyed by deer, voles, and slugs. In my own garden the voles sometimes get them even when they are sunk into the ground in plastic pots.

    So why did I find myself on a recent Saturday morning driving to a meeting of the Tri-State Hosta Society, a chapter of the American Hosta Society, in Northport, north of Exit 51 on the Long Island Expressway? It had to be more than a writer in search of a story.

    At least one member came with a spreadsheet detailing her own collection, referring to it intently as we paid homage to the pristine clumps of well-labeled specimens in our hosts’ garden. The thought of voles restrained my bidding during the auction, but the adrenaline rush and lust for the hostas in that garden caused me to make an appointment to visit a few days later Long Island’s Home of Hostas (lihosta.com), a satisfying specialty nursery owned by Mike and Dawn Koller at their house in Medford.

    Yes, satisfying because in spite of the odds favoring vole damage, 13 pots proved irresistible and returned with me to East Hampton.

    I’ve wanted to share this nursery with you for several years now. The Kollers have established jaw-dropping display beds at the front and side of the house with their collection of about 600 well-labeled hostas. The plants demonstrate their mature sizes and are grown in combinations that make their colors explode. A large sales area is in the rear.

    To do justice to the plants at least two trips are needed to explore the display gardens properly. The first to admire individual plants and make notes on which you might want to purchase, and the second to absorb the plant combinations. Last week I arrived with a wish list of plants I had drooled over at the hosta meeting, and yes, Holy Mouse Ears, a variegated miniature sport of the very popular Blue Mouse Ears, and the large, variegated Earth Angel were available.

    Miniatures are becoming more and more popular. They are best grown away from the competition and chaos in the shade garden (at least in mine), where they are overwhelmed and easily lost. Miniatures can do well at the front of beds but are more reliably grown in raised beds or troughs. Raised beds are ideal because the plants are closer to eye level for easier viewing, but stay alert to incursions of chipmunks and voles. A terrific idea from the Kollers is planting miniatures as a groundcover under a small Japanese maple in a container. I’m trying an adaptation, growing them under the drip line of a cutleaf Japanese maple in the middle of the lawn.

    The United States is the center of hosta breeding. There are thousands of registered cultivars, categorized by size from miniature, small, and medium to large, and by leaf color. But that doesn’t begin to describe them. Leaf texture can be so delicate exposure to sun melts it, or leathery and rumpled enough to resist slugs; it can be glossy or have a matte finish.

    Convention has it you don’t grow hostas for their flowers, but that is not completely true. Some are highly fragrant. A few have double flowers. Others are an arresting dark purple. And then there is my favorite hosta of all, the very large, variegated Sagae. Its bud is mesmerizing, looking like a very slowly opening lotus over a period of weeks.

    To protect plants from voles many collectors have begun sinking metal mesh baskets in the ground and then potting the hostas in the baskets. A friend who recently visited Tennessee reports gardeners there place hostas in simple terra-cotta pots throughout the beds. In Japan, where land is at a premium, hostas are traditionally grown in containers and displayed near the door. The best protection of all is Little Louie, the Christmas kitten, who seems to be eliminating both moles and voles far better and more safely than rat bait in traps.

    That shade garden in Northport deftly demonstrates how to integrate hostas, even a large collection, into the fabric of the design. Hostas and hydrangeas make excellent companions, particularly when matching the shade of green of the hydrangea leaf with that of the hosta. Some of the new heucheras, such as Obsidian, Caramel, and Encore, tiarellas, carexes, and cultivars of Japanese forest grass, Hakonechloa macra, are good combinations with hostas.

    Why the passion for hostas? Who knows. But just thinking of them makes their siren song all the sweeter.

   When Pietro Nivola and Katherine Stahl decided to move and reconstruct the house he inherited on Old Stone Highway in Springs, they may not have anticipated how complicated the project would be or that it would take five years.

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    Mr. Nivola, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has spent all his summers there since early childhood. His parents, the sculptor Costantino Nivola and Ruth Nivola, a jewelry designer, bought the approximately 32-acre property, with a house and barn that date to the 1750s, in 1948.

    A large studio and a tiny building were added to the grounds, along with a free-standing fireplace, a bread oven, a grape arbor, gardens, a solarium, and three concrete walls, one with a drawing on it and one with a small window cut into it. Mr. Nivola had constructed then to evoke open air “rooms.”

    The house served them well over the years. It also was a magnet for visiting artists, including the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who, over a long weekend in 1950, painted a mural on two of the living room walls.

    But the house had one major problem: It was in a low-lying swale and subjected to regular flooding. Not only was this destructive of the building — one of the town’s most ancient — but mold had invaded the mural, which is the only one Le Corbusier painted in the United States. (Mrs. Nivola had it restored in 2006, but the flooding continued, and the mold came back.)

    The younger Nivola generation and their parents had discussed the future of the property, and how to preserve some of it, for decades. Not long after Mrs. Nivola’s death in 2008, they sold more than 20 acres to the Town of East Hampton as open space. A smaller parcel went to the Jewish Center of the Hamptons cemetery, Shaarey Pardes. Pietro Nivola and his sister, Claire Nivola Kiley, divided the remaining property, with Mr. Nivola getting the house, the mural, and two and a half acres.

    “It became clear that there was a limited range of options, arguably only one option,” Mr. Nivola said. To save the mural, they would have to save the house. The question became, “Do you rebuild it in situ or move it back and up?” An even harder question, he said, was whether to preserve additions to the house built over the years. A central staircase had been put in at some point and a renovation took place in the 1920s. The old floorboards were covered throughout the house, and a new kitchen and porches added. The front porch may have gone up even later.

    The decision made, Mr. Nivola said several highly recommended contractors turned the work down. Some refused to bid on the job. Others said it was “too far gone” and should be torn down. However, Tim Mott of T.S. Mott General Contracting, took it on and Guy Davis, whose company moved the de Menil houses that now form East Hampton’s Town Hall and the Amagansett Life-Saving Station, among scores of other buildings, was hired.

    The house was taken 100 feet straight back — a foot at a time to spare the mural — gaining six feet of elevation. Greg Condon, a landscaper and arborist, had several trees moved (that were recently replanted) and saw to the removal of 65 years of overgrowth to make way for it. The house was aligned with the senior Mr. Nivola’s studio at one end and the gardens and outdoor fireplace on the other.

    “Guy Davis is precision personified,” Mr. Nivola said. “The house was barely held together by its skin, and he managed to pull it off.” Mr. Nivola also had good things to say about Mr. Mott, who is from Sag Harbor, and his crew. “It was a high-wire act in extremis, and moving that house with the murals was hazardous,” he said.

    When it was decided that the old porches and the back end of the house, including the kitchen, were too dilapidated to be moved, Mr. Nivola said he asked himself, “Why put them back by rebuilding them like a Hollywood set?” Instead, a new kitchen and mudroom were built in a 23-by-20-foot addition, bringing the house to just under 2,000 square feet.

    One thing that had bothered Mr. Nivola about the house  was that the living room was rarely used, and, therefore, the Le Corbusier mural hardly seen. What Mr. Nivola wanted, and achieved, he said, was “one continuous, integrated space.” Now the mural can be seen from anywhere on the ground floor, which is open and airy and punctuated with brilliant color in artwork and furnishings.

    Whenever possible, changes were made to bring in more light. To that end, the dining room was designed to resemble a screened porch, with sets of  three French doors. Although the couple wanted a functional kitchen, they tried to capture the warmth and spirit of the old one. The sink is in an island with wooden shelves on one side and a breadboard holder, designed by Mr. Nivola’s father, at an end. The cupboards are wood, and the original kitchen table is in a sunny corner.

    Mr. Nivola, who had some training in design, worked with James Laspesa, a Sag Harbor architect, on the plans. “The thinking this thing through, and roughing out the design, we did together,” Mr. Nivola said.

    All the work was done with great care, Mr. Nivola said. Carpenters proceeded foot by foot on the first floor to make sure it was as level as possible and sturdy enough for the house to sit on. Cross-bracing was added where needed. Drew Bennett, an engineer for the job, told Mr. Nivola he was doing an honorable thing. 

    Original beams were exposed in the living room and, when the 20th-century flooring was removed, the old floorboards were found to be in good enough shape to be retained. Newspapers used as insulation between the floors of the two-story house, dating from 1917 to 1922, were found.

    Ms. Stahl, who has just retired from American University, where she was executive director of its career center, located pine floorboards salvaged from a 1780 house in New Hampshire for the new addition. There were enough to cover all but four square feet of the mudroom, so wood from old gutters was used to fill the gap.

    Two matching doors from the old house, with hand-blown panes, open into the kitchen from the mudroom. They add light to the kitchen, as does a skylight. A half-bathroom was put in under the stairs to the second floor. There had been four bedrooms upstairs but the space was reconfigured, which provided room for a second upstairs bathroom and a small study with one window facing north and one east.

    In the place of the original entrance to the house, which had been closed off when the 1920s porches were added, Mr. Nivola had a window put in. A door at the north end of the house leads to the arbor, next to the spot where the senior Mr. Nivola had a vegetable garden. The couple plan one there, as well.

    The original chimney was taken down and most of the old windows removed, but they are going to the barn, which the couple hope to make into guest quarters for their children and grandchildren some day. Tall windows replaced those removed, and one was added in the living room. A basement was dug and a gas furnace and central air-conditioning installed.

    The last thing to be done was the mural’s repair. It

developed a small crack during the move and was definitely looking tired. Catherine Myers, a restoration specialist, did an amazing job, Mr. Nivola said.

    Although delays caused the project to take longer than expected, Mr. Nivola is satisfied that he has completed his father’s vision of indoor and outdoor rooms. Now, even the new grassy glade in front of the house is one of them. “The idea was to bring the outside in and the inside out,” he said.

    When he was only 10, Michael Derrig’s mother bought him a circular saw.           “I built my first brick patio when I was 11,” the landscape architect and founder of Landscape Details in Sag Harbor said with obvious pride.

    When he was 14, his widowed mother would hoist a ladder onto her car and drive him to his weekend house-painting jobs. “I was always very entrepreneurial. I gave a fair price and got the job done. I got a lot of work that way.”

    These days, Mr. Derrig still gets a lot of work. Landscape Details, which he established in 2000, has been responsible for many private gardens on the South Fork, most notably a 50-acre estate on Noyac Path, which will be on two house tours this summer -– to benefit the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons and Guild Hall.

    The Noyac property was all trees when Mr. Derrig started. “We cut the grade, created the fields, set the plants and trees — all of it from the woods,” he said. “We were walking around with hand sketches of what should go where.” His eyes brighten as he describes the flower gardens, masonry, lighting, and specimen trees.

    Mr. Derrig is one of a few registered landscape architects on the East End, although the appellation is sometimes used by those without degrees, he said. Becoming one was no easy feat, he said. He grew up in New Jersey, and his study in the landscape architecture department at Rutgers University culminated with a three-day test on everything from grading and drainage to design, which he described as grueling.

    Landscape architects often go into civic or corporate work, and Mr. Derrig did. He put in time at college campuses, ballparks, and zoos. But a visit to the South Fork astonished him and changed his direction.

    “When I saw the amount of trees. . . .” He trailed off, his face filled with the memory common to those in his line of work when they first see the many species that grace many of the area’s estate neighborhoods.

At the time, Mr. Derrig and his wife, Dwyer, were living in a “14-by-20-foot studio with a six-foot drafting table,” he said.  When a job offer came along, he and his wife packed up their 3-month-old daughter and moved. “People thought I was nuts,” he said with a laugh. “It’s like I was giving up this great career path to be a gardener. But I’m a landscape architect who actually landscapes. That’s what I tell people.”

    After working with Renner Landscaping, which was based in Sag Harbor, for a few years, Mr. Derrig went out on his own. “I didn’t have much,” he said. “A pickup truck and a couple of mowers.” But he saw an opportunity to provide maintenance as well as design and installation.

     “I really like to keep working with a client, to act on their vision, to add to it, and improve it,” he said.  He has been working on the Noyac Path property for 10 years now.

    “It’s amazing how intelligent my clients are,” he said. “They’re thoughtful, and they learn about landscaping very quickly. I guess I never really expected that. You learn to appreciate the good ones,” he said.

     Mr. Derrig also builds houses. “It’s a passion,” he said. He hopes that the builders he works with when designing landscapes don’t think he is competing with them. “I just love building stuff,” he said.

    Mr. Derrig says there are few regions like this, where people love and care for their outdoor spaces as much as indoor ones.

    “I came out for the love of trees, and I stayed when I saw how much people on the East End put into their landscaping, and the level of architecture and design. It’s pretty exciting.”

    To discover new garden-worthy plants you don’t have to slip and slide through snowmelt or scramble across unstable screes on remote mountaintops in Turkey as I did with great glee last month. All that is needed are visits to fine public and private gardens.

    That is how three of the new plants I’m most excited about made it to the Garden Club of East Hampton’s plant sale at the Mulford Farm tomorrow evening and Saturday morning.

    After checking to see how the new, long-flowering and disease-resistant roses at the New York Botanical Garden had withstood the ferocious weather of last August, I strolled through the new Azalea Garden. There, in a hillside clearing in filtered sun, was a mass of color, bright pink and purple. It was just after Labor Day, when you don’t expect to see such exuberance in the garden.

     The perennial to the rear was easy to identify: Chelone lyonii Hot Lips, an East Coast native called the turtlehead. The purplish flowers in the front, though, were completely new to me, and the gardeners working in the area couldn’t help. A few weeks later I met the garden’s designer, Sheila Brady, a partner at Oehme, van Sweden who also is working on the new native plant garden at the botanical garden, and she identified the mystery plant as Vernonia lettermanii, the narrowleaf ironweed that is native to Arkansas. The turtlehead and the ironweed flower in August and September, and both are now growing in combination at Mimi Meehan’s Native Plant Garden behind Clinton Academy.

    The other two new perennials, also native plants, had been incorporated in the Battery Conservancy gardens in Lower Manhattan by the Dutch designer and plantsman Piet Oudolf. When encountered for the first time in mid-July a couple of years ago, they left me gasping and lusting. Scutellaria incana was covered with long-flowering blue spikes, and from the distance Phlox paniculata Blue Paradise appeared deep purple. Neither has been easy to obtain. Phlox Blue Paradise, introduced by the Dutch designer, is deservedly so popular it has been selling out long before the season begins. Last week, I visited the plants for the Garden Club sale, and two dozen have our name on them. Come early.

    The scutellaria didn’t seem to be commercially available although it is native to nearly the entire country east of the Mississippi, except New England. One Midwest nursery grew it, but doesn’t have mail-order. Thanks to persistent requests, Glover Perennials has begun growing it, and we may have a dozen and a half plants at the sale. Don’t expect flowers yet, but the very narrow foliage is good looking and they will provide a treat in August.

    The Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden, thanks to the generosity of her family, has become my test garden, or playpen, to study plant performance in our area. Two plants that were new last season have been very successful: the tickseed Coreopsis Full Moon is clear canary yellow. If you have ever had to dead-head coreopsis, you’ll appreciate that Full Moon is self-cleaning and flowers nonstop until Thanksgiving. It may be a little taller than expected so I’ve been instructed to cut it back (about one-third) to keep it low and bushy. We did that with a hedge clipper last week.

    A verbena that is really hardy and long-flowering is worth its weight in gold. V. canadensis Pink Pepper has proved itself. It’s a terrific bright pink, front-of-the border plant, and we’ve expanded the native plant garden with it.    

    Maybe you can do your plant hunting at the Mulford Farm this weekend. Leave the scouting to us, and you get to mix and match. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as it were.

    What to do when the indispensable trowel gets lost together with the hand-held shears. One has lost one’s hands, fingers. One is doomed to not garden that day.

And why has this happened when the trowel and the secateurs are indeed one’s hands, the wrists inutile without them? God help one’s psyche. What ruin and havoc will be next?

I hear the even, sweet, exasperating perseverance of Mother’s voice: “Where were you when you last had them?” Oh gaaaah! When last I had them fountains tossed in the sun, bright angels flew and landed in rose petals, and the air was laden with light and eddying perfume. Baskets of rare and perfect fruit were everywhere. Piles of gold.

Both tools have bright red handles. Red and green is why butchers put parsley on steaks and hamburger meat. Meat then is redder. So that if my two tools are astray in the grass their handles ought to be shouting.

And the day began so reasonably. A tour of the potager to have a single sprig of parsley with a drop of very cold dew on it. Admiring the buds on the tibouchina brought out for the summer. Soon. Thinking no growth is as bright and green as young growth of the yew. Whether hedge or specimen. Pure cadmium.

It was then that I thought to do some gardening but began to draw and from that went to writing and so gardening came late that morning.

    Did I go out with the trowel and the shears?

    How could I not? They are as necessary as hands to a pianist. And they have been indispensable for many, many centuries from Toparius on down and before that I’m sure.

    I wish I knew some cries of lament —  some dumps and dirges. (I’m sure that they follow some sort of formula.)

    Down the road a bit lies Alice A., a walking rain cloud of a hand-wringer. I’m certain she would know. “Elegy on the Loss of One’s Favorite Tools.” (Spade of my heart, my only. Shears forlorn, as well. . . .) How the tears will flow.

    I limp. I stagger. I am deeply ashamed. I cannot walk without my trowel, my shears. It is worse than being undressed. “That is worse than a nude!” said the sister of the collector Chester Dale when he showed her a Modigliani he had bought.

    I will not buy a new trowel, a new secateur, any more than a Boston lady buys a hat. She has one. Whether on her head or not, it shows. She is accoutered for life.

    And then I cry Fool! I never took them out.

    There they are, in the shed where last night I left them after oiling the springs of the shears and stroking the trowel through a pail of linseed oil, turpentine, and sand to protect the blade from rust.

    Those who might be tired of the same old East Hampton houses can have a taste of Southampton living this weekend with the Insider’s View of Southampton Homes tour offered by the Southampton Historical Museum on Saturday from 1 to 4:30 p.m.

    According to the tour organizers, including Tom Edmonds, the director of the museum, and Melody Tierney, a committee member, they often vet 15 to 20 houses to arrive at the 6 in the tour. They look for important structures as well as restorations that are special or creative and that honor the building’s history. Modern buildings with graceful or interesting designs are also considered.

    “It doesn’t have to be historic,” Ms. Tierney said. Still, the museum likes to encourage historic preservation whenever possible.

    Included on the tour is Five Chimneys, a house on Hill Street with a decidedly East Hampton feel, a good transition into the alien terrain. The house had its start in 1795 as a one-room farmhouse with a dirt-floor kitchen and fireplace in the basement. It was built by E.T. Howell, a descendant of one of the founding families of Southampton. The house was part of a large farm north of Hill Street. The farm’s outbuildings are now additional private residences.

    The house was expanded and updated to a Greek Revival style around 1820 to 1840. Then, Aymar Embury, who designed Guild Hall and the East Hampton Library, expanded it again in 1911 for Marshall Fry, an artist and ceramicist who taught at William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock Summer School of Art. He called the house Wayside.

    Among the interior changes Embury initiated to agree with a model of country living he was developing at the time were removing the center hall staircase and paneling the entrance hall, dining room, and living room to tie all three rooms together. Four staff rooms downstairs are now two bedrooms. A detached “summer kitchen” was built and connected to the main house through a breezeway. This area is now the great room.

    In later years, the house served as the summer residence of Al Smith, who was the governor of New York at the time. It was also owned by Southampton College at one point and served as the college president’s house. The current owners have had the house since 1987 and have undertaken several preservation projects in that time. They continue to call it Five Chimneys.

    Other stops on the tour include a house on Mill Pond with post-and-beam construction of its original core and a later 19th-century addition with wide plank floors, carved moldings, and many fireplaces. Elsewhere, a beachfront residence constructed in about 1910 has been in several films, desired for its classic shingled look as well as its amenities.

    An 1807 house can boast of visitors such as Daniel Webster and James Fennimore Cooper. Before it was moved to its current location it served as the post office for a time on Main Street as well as an inn and tavern. A later house designed by Jaquelin T. Robertson, an architect with a house in East Hampton, provides an education on color with an unusual exterior paint choice and lively uses of color inside.

    The tour concludes with a champagne reception and preview of Chris Murray’s show “Paintings of New York.” Tickets cost $75 in advance through the museum Web site, southamptonhistoricalmuseum.org, or $90 on the day of the tour at the Thomas Halsey Homestead from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.