Kate Wyckoff-Holmes

Kate Morgan Wyckoff-Holmes, an artist who lived in Sag Harbor for many years and who specialized in garden design, died at home in Key West, Fla., on Aug. 30. Ms. Wyckoff-Holms was 85 and had cancer.

She was a brilliant painter, said her husband, Samuel S. Holmes, and through designing gardens, she was able to put her talents to work on a larger scale, using nature’s palette.

Her firm, Beach Plum Gardens, which she founded in 1982, designed numerous Sag Harbor gardens, including those of Thomas Harris, author of “Silence of the Lambs.” She also designed the horticultural displays at the graves of the ballet greats George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova in Sag Harbor’s Oakland Cemetery. 

Born in Manhattan to Watson Wyckoff and Kate Morgan on June 28, 1931, she grew up in Manhattan and in Sharon, Conn.

She attended the University of Colorado before obtaining her Bachelor of Sciences degree from Brooklyn College. At one point, she moved to California to study art, her son, Peter Wyckoff, said yesterday.

Cooking and entertaining were passions for her. She studied cooking with Dione Lucas, and had a collection of over 150 cookbooks. The barbecue was an important place to her, and she loved grilling and smoking meats, including whole turkeys.

She also studied at the New York Botanical Garden, where the seed was planted that grew into her life’s passion — designing gardens, essentially painting in flowers. Some of her designs in the city included a neighborhood park in the Bronx and the garden of the China Institute. She primarily designed gardens on city terraces.

She loved sailing, and kept a 25-foot sailboat at a marina in Larchmont, from which she would sail across Long Island Sound and into the Atlantic off Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island.

Her first marriage, in the 1960s, ended in divorce. In the early 1980s, after her son graduated from high school and began college, she moved to Sag Harbor. She was a member of the Friends of John Jermain Memorial Library. In 1999 she married Mr. Holmes, a retired National Park ranger. They lived on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, but moved to Key West about five years ago.

Mr. Holmes and her son both live in Key West.

Ms. Wyckof-Holmes asked that her body be donated to science and then cremated. Her ashes will be buried in Oakland Cemetery at a future date.

Donations have been suggested to Planned Parenthood, found online at plannedparenthood.org.