Landscaping Is a Gift to the Community

Thanks to a Springs resident who has made a sizable donation to pay for landscaping, Ashawagh Hall, which is owned by the Springs Improvement Society and serves as a center for activities from concerts to art shows and civic group meetings, is sporting a new but natural look.

“It’s quite simple, and it matches the kind of unadorned, unpretentious look that Ashawagh Hall has,” Phyllis Kriegel said in an interview last week. Ms. Kriegel, who regularly attends art openings at the hall, said she had noticed a lack of foundation plantings around the building and offered to have landscaping designed and installed for the entire property.

“The interior is just so filled with the enormous energy and artistic spirit,” she said, “and it seemed to me that the exterior should just introduce you to what’s going to happen inside.” The plantings were kept simple “because of the spirit of the place,” Ms. Kriegel said.

Designed and put in by Marybeth LaPenna Lee of LaPenna Lee Gardens, the new landscaping creates “a kind of unadorned elegance,” she said.

A former editor of New Directions for Women, a feminist publication, Ms. Kriegel went to Italy to study painting when the publication folded. She has dedicated her time to being an artist, studying for many years at the Art Barge on Napeague, including this summer, and has shown her work at Ashawagh Hall.

Just over two decades ago, her son, David Kriegel, then a new architect, set his sights on the house on Old Stone Highway where she now lives. It had belonged to the Bennett family and was among a string of houses built in the days when that part of Springs was called East Side.

He planned to renovate it for resale. But, Ms. Kriegel said, “I decided it was so nice we should keep it in the family.” It became her summer home.

“I think that Ashawagh Hall is sort of the heart and the hub of the people in Springs,” Ms. Kriegel said. “It has so much history to it — the artists who have shown there, the Invitational. . . . I’ve been to concerts there, lectures, even memorial services.”

Realizing that Ashawagh Hall had “such meaning for people,” Ms. Kreigel said she decided that a donation for plantings would be “a way to give my thanks to the community.”

“The building doesn’t need to be dressed up, just augmented,” Ms. Lee said on Tuesday. She planted juniper, boxwood, and grasses around its edge, choosing natural looking and deer-resistant plants. Some daylilies, though attractive to deer, were added for color in corners where she hopes they may be protected and remain uneaten. Mostly, though, the palette remained “plain green and white — nothing fancy,” Ms. Lee said.

Along the Springs-Fireplace Road front, she planted a tricolor beech tree, about 12 feet high. When it takes root, it will fill a space that will be created with the removal of one of the two cherry trees that have been flowering, magnificently, each spring for years, as it is dead. The beech will become “a focal point,” Ms. Lee said.

To mask a box for heating and cooling equipment, she filled a bed with ornamental grasses and bayberry. She installed a pebbled corridor around the exterior walls, for access and drainage, then “neatened things up” with mulch and delineated planting beds around existing trees. Ms. Lee said she enlisted Jason Agudo of Aquaworks to install irrigation for ongoing care and maintenance of the plants.

The Springs Improvement Society undertook full repairs and renovation of the building several years ago, paid for through a fund-raising campaign, a bank loan, and a sizable private donation. There was nothing left for landscaping, however, Ed Michels, the president of the S.I.S. board, said yesterday. Ms. Kriegel’s donation was “very, very generous,” Mr. Michels said. “It was a very nice thing she did.” The board of the community center, he said, is “very appreciative, and can’t thank her enough.”