Garden and Home

Spring and summer 2026 promise many moments rich with beauty in the garden, the oasis to which we escape, seeking solace, wonder, and peace. Here, our editor’s choice of garden-related events for the season ahead — from the edifying and educational to the purely pleasurable.

It’s officially spring and all around East Hampton Village, there are signs of change: buds ready to burst at the Nature Trail, peepers serenading whoever’s listening, weather that won’t make up its mind . . . and a big pile of earth on the grounds of the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s headquarters, the historical Gardiner Brown House on Main Street.

“All gardens are a form of autobiography,” said the late, great Bob Dash, who began ‘writing’ his own into the soil of Sagaponack in 1967 — a story those at the Madoo Conservancy have continued in the dozen years since Dash’s death and the four decades the public has been welcomed into his two-acre botanical sanctuary.

If you have explored natural approaches to gardening, you may have heard of biodynamics. Depending on how it’s described, it can sound either mystical or based on ancient farming wisdom.

There it was: the moment the Garden Book editor became a gardener herself.

In the Victorian-era school of thought known as “the Language of Flowers,” wisteria is associated with romance, beauty, and devotion, with a slightly ominous postscript referencing the plant’s twisting vines and warning of loving something a little too much, lest it be suffocated.

Floral arranging and gardening have been Lilee Fell’s synergistic passions since childhood. As the owner of Lilee Fell Flowers in Sag Harbor, she grew up watching her mother create floral arrangements for garden club flower shows and her grandmother making arrangements for their church’s altar guild.

Concerned Citizens of Montauk is urging home gardeners and professional landscapers alike to stop adding synthetic fertilizer on their lawns, flower beds, and vegetable gardens.

It’s time to get growing. The publication of The East Hampton Star’s annual East End Garden and Home supplement means the 2025 gardening season is officially under way. With this comes a lively calendar of spring and summer events, including garden workshops, educational lectures, art activities, and benefit parties, just a few of which are detailed here. Additional events may be added as the season progresses, so readers should check with their favorite organizations and garden clubs for more information.

Joe Silvestro is proof that high school robotics clubs can prepare students for future careers. He graduated from Southold High School in 2020, “a crazy time,” he said, to be stepping out into the real world. Two semesters at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in upstate Oneida soon helped him realize that college wasn’t for him, and he went to work for the Mills Canvas company in Greenport. Now, five years later, Mr. Silvestro is a founding partner in a company called Talos 3D Fabrication in Southampton.

Georgia O’Keeffe once said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.” In the spirit of the pioneering modernist painter’s hope to give that world to others, The Star spoke with two local anthophiles about extending the ‘moment’ of both store-bought and hand-harvested bouquets.

Long Island’s South Fork, known for beaches, maritime history, and fancy people, is also known for its hedges. Hedge installation and maintenance are big business, and there could be a whole book about hedges, with different varieties popular during different eras. In the last decade, for example, the “green giant,” a now ubiquitous tree, has been placed along property lines throughout the Hamptons. It’s here to stay, and grow, and grow.

The first thing Arthur Beckenstein sees when he steps out of his bedroom every morning is a lush spread of vibrant, earthy color. Maybe it's a textured greenish-brown in the winter, but come spring, summer, and fall, fresh pops of emerald, lime, yellow, purple, and red fill his field of view. It's not a painting. Rather, it's a landscape — a rooftop garden atop a one-story section of his house, visible from the second-floor windows. A green roof, to be exact.

Liz and Joe Sanicola’s house in East Quogue is a modern homesteading paradise — the ultimate intersection between home and garden.

Here's a guide to growing and enjoying your best tomato-flavored life, thanks to Matthew Quick, the farm manager for the nonprofit Share the Harvest Farm, and Marilee Foster, who typically grows 100 varieties each year on her Sagaponack farm.

Ever wonder about the long ribbon of pink and white hibiscus blooming at the entrance to the village in late summer, or the flower-filled meadow between Accabonac Road and Methodist Lane? These are working rain gardens that slow, capture, and filter rainwater and road runoff as the water makes its way through the Hook Pond watershed and eventually into the ocean. They are successful examples of a natural solution to a water pollution problem.

In the summer months, under the immaculately tended giant rhododendron stand in Henry and Martha Murray's backyard on Further Lane in Amagansett, their young grandchildren can be glimpsed darting in and out of the canopy of fuchsia blossoms, visible one second, gone the next.

It takes understated talent and a keen eye for a designer to balance her personal aesthetic with those of a client. "I consider it high praise when a client's family or friends walk into the space and say it's a reflection of the client and doesn't feel designed," said Delia Kenza, an interior designer based in Sag Harbor and Brooklyn.

For gardeners and landscapers seeking four-season interest, low maintenance, and environmental impact, trees check off all the boxes. Plus, they offer shade for sitting areas, a backdrop for a garden, and nesting places for birds, among ecological benefits. Just as there’s no irrigation watering trees in a forest, it is not needed for the established trees in your yard. The time and money saved on irrigation and maintenance might feel liberating.

Margie Ruddick of the landscape planning and designing firm that bears her name has drawn the proverbial line in the sand, choosing to stop taking on projects that involve new construction, except for well-scaled additions. 

The Traceys are embarking this season on an expansion that will see them transition from their previous location, a Peconic Land Trust plot of a little under an acre behind Balsam Farm in Amagansett, to a three-acre property on Montauk Highway that was known as Bhumi Farm for a couple of years.

Frederico Azevedo has always been enamored with nature, flowers in particular. “As a child I would rearrange the plants for fun and plant the ingredients for my favorite foods,” he said. “The exciting thing about this medium is how it can make people happy and open up new parts of your life.” His business, Unlimited Earth Care in Bridgehampton, is celebrating a milestone this year.

Let us introduce you to the Landcraft Garden Foundation, the North Fork’s fraternal obverse to Jack Lenor Larsen’s LongHouse Reserve and a paradise that Dennis Schrader and Bill Smith have been building on the North Fork since 1992.

The Star’s hunter-gatherer, Durell Godfrey, went looking for the kind of stuff that Mother Nature would be happy to use — and reuse whenever possible. She loves sustainability, and so will you. Shop locally and thoughtfully.

. . . They’d ask for wallpaper, and they’d ask for Heather Dunn.

The gardens at Home, Sweet Home Museum were dedicated on Sept. 29, 2022, to Loretta Orion, who spent many years restoring and tending them. Ms. Orion, an anthropology professor, a French teacher, an author, a private duty nurse, a seamstress, and an etcher, died in July 2022 at the age of 77. The gardens are always on view for visitors at 14 James Lane.

Doug Tallamy, an entomologist, author, and professor at the University of Delaware, encourages homeowners to think about the role our yards play in the food chain that sustains birds and wildlife. The immense decline of the bird population by one-third over the past 50 years has opened eyes to its urgency.

At first, I liked the bamboo. It was a comforting green wall, separating me from my neighbor’s pool. When the wind blew, it sounded like one hand clapping. At the same time, I found myself thinking, “If the revolution comes, I will dig a trench around my house and fill it with bamboo spears.”

A home vegetable gardener offers some hard won advice for getting the most out of your garden along with what grows best here.

Who better to understand the power of collaborations between brands than two women with backgrounds in the fashion industry, which seems to rely on the constant merging of brands? With 100 Design Style, Nikki Butler and Brigitte Branconnier created an interior design company that seems to strike the perfect balance between layout, light, color, tactile materials, and a connection to nature.