The Saga Behind Sagapress

It was never Ngaere Macray's intention to become a publisher. It happened because she couldn't find the classic gardening books she wanted, either in America, where no one had heard of them, or in England, where booksellers knew the books but couldn't find them.

On a visit to England, someone suggested she try Hay-on-Wye, a town of bookshops on the Welsh border. In an essay in Hortus, she wrote of how she and her husband rented a small plane and set out to this bibliophilic Ultima Thule.

"It was an eventful journey: First we flew through the Brize Norton restricted military air space, causing some emergency alerts and warnings, which we failed to understand because of the static on the radio."

A Complete Jekyll

"Then I managed to fly directly over the chimneys of a nuclear power plant, with the alarming result that our small plane was lifted straight up at the rate of a thousand feet a minute, while I struggled to keep it under control and managed instead to put us into a nosedive once we had passed through the thermal."

"Despite all this the day was a triumph because there, in Richard Booth's bookshop, I found a complete set of Gertrude Jekyll's books."

As the books had been out of print for 30 years, Ms. Macray tried to persuade her husband, who was a publisher, to reprint them. His response was, "Do it yourself."

Landscape History

And so in 1982 she started Sagapress, a horticultural and landscape-design press which she operates from the garage of her house in Sagaponack.

In the early years she resuscitated some of the out-of-print classics of English gardening, like the Jekyll books, and some modern classics by Brent Elliott, Will Ingwersen, Sir Roy Strong, and Hazel Le Rougetel.

But as Sagapress evolved, American landscape history has become its dominant interest, with the aim of introducing a public increasingly interested in gardening to such almost forgotten landscape stars as Beatrix Farrand, Ellen Biddle Shipman, Fletcher Steele, Lester Collins, Florence Yoch, and others.

Shipman's Gardens

As Ms. Macray writes in the introduction to Sagapress's catalogue, the books are published "in the belief that gardening is an art and that landscape design, like architecture, reflects the social and cultural history of the country of its origin."

Sagapress's latest book, "The Gardens of Ellen Biddle Shipman," will be launched with a reading at Book Hampton in East Hampton on Saturday at 5:30 p.m.

Between 1914 and 1946, Ellen Biddle Shipman designed and installed over 650 gardens throughout the United States, including that of the Maidstone Club in East Hampton and 17 others in Suffolk County.

"Gardening," she wrote, "opens a wider door than any other of the arts - all mankind can walk through. . . . It has no distinctions, all are welcome."

Nomenclature

Beginner's luck played a part in Ms. Macray's first project. She asked her favorite garden writer, Graham Stuart Thomas, gardens adviser to Britain's National Trust and restorer of some of that country's great gardens, to write introductions to the new Jekyll editions.

Not only did he agree, but he also generously took on the task of covering changes in nomenclature.

"I was enormously grateful," she said, "but I didn't appreciate until years later just how big a favor it had been."

She later published enlarged and revised editions of all of Mr. Thomas's books, including the first big book she did by herself, "The Complete Flower Paintings and Drawings of Graham Stuart Thomas."

Three Years On

It is no small undertaking to start a publishing house by yourself, and Ms. Macray relied on the knowledge and experience of her husband, Arnold Zohn, to steer her way without disaster. Then, barely three years into the enterprise, her husband became seriously ill.

He died in May 1985, when Ms. Macray was in the middle of a book on Beatrix Farrand which would accompany a traveling exhibit of the designer's work.

"I wanted to quit, I didn't think I could do it alone." But knowing so many people were relying on her, she stuck it out.

In the years since, she has produced over 40 titles. The landscape design books are distributed by Harry N. Abrams and the horticultural books are co-editions with Timber Press.

They include a finely illustrated book on the gardens of Innisfree, an exquisite but little-known public garden on 200 acres in Millbrook, N.Y., inspired by a scroll painting of the eighth-century Chinese garden of the poet Wang Wei and designed by Lester Collins.

Hollywood's Landscapist

There is a book about Florence Yoch, who not only designed the splendid Hollywood gardens of such moguls as George Cukor, Jack Warner, and David Selznick, but conjured up the daffodil-filled meadows in "How Green Was My Valley," the antebellum gardens of "Gone With the Wind," and the lush oases of "The Garden of Allah."

When filming "Romeo and Juliet," with which he was passionately involved, Irving Thalberg had the designer create a complete garden just for the few moments of the balcony scene.

Money was no object: In perhaps her most spectacular assignment, for "The Good Earth," Ms. Yoch turned a large area of the hills of the San Fernando Valley into the terraced fields and flooded rice paddies of China.

Original Plates

While working on Charles Platt's "Italian Gardens," Ms. Macray discovered that the Platt family still had the original silver nitrate photographic plates stored in the attic, together with others that had never been published, which she was able to use in the reprint.

Sagapress has also done a series on foreign gardens and reprints of seminal books on individual plants - daylilies, peonies, narcissus, meconopsis, and crocus and colchicum - where the original book is reprinted together with new material and illustrations.

Perhaps the most stunning book the press has published is its limited edition of paintings, drawings, and text on Japanese plants, "Japonica Magnifica" by Raymond Booth.

What is particularly interesting is the Japanese aesthetic that imbues each painting, almost as if the artist had breathed it in from the plants themselves while half a world away in the gloom and drizzle of England.

Sold at a price of $150, no copies remain. It has become a limited edition because it is now economically unfeasible to reprint it.

Many Sagapress books are accompanied by traveling exhibits. "There's nothing risque about the subject matter," Ms. Macray said wryly, "so we don't have much trouble with grants."

The Parrish Art Museum has curated an exhibit for "The Gardens of Ellen Biddle Shipman" which will open at the PaineWebber Art Gallery in New York City on Jan. 24. It will move to the Museums at Stony Brook in April.

When questioned tentatively about the financial side of the business, Ms. Macray groaned expressively.

"It's always a risk - everything that can go wrong does go wrong," she said. "The bookselling business is a nightmare, the cost of producing books is enormous, and the headaches of distribution are never-ending."

"Everything I Desire"

"But I'm here in my garage with just the part-time help of Carol Lewis, who handles production, and I go very slowly and cautiously."

In the past few years she has been helped by the Library of American Landscape History, an organization founded in association with Sagapress to fund books on the subject. It finances authors while they are researching and writing and is reimbursed from royalties when the books are published.

Three years after the death of her second husband, Ms. Macray, a skilled and enthusiastic gardener in her own right, married David Seeler, the owner of the Bayberry Nursery in Amagansett.

"I'm like Imelda Marcus in a shoe factory," she said. "I have access to everything I desire."

Ms. Macray herself, who was born in Nigeria and grew up in England and Switzerland, comes across as a quiet Indiana Jones of horticultural publishing, bent on preserving the best of the past for the benefit of the future and not afraid to face challenges along the way.