This Saturday evening, on an 11-acre plot of land in Springs, a twisted version of Las Vegas, where nature-based gambling games raise money for an arboretum devoted to ecological storytelling and an artist in residence program, will, improbably, be the place to be.
From 6 to 9 p.m., the Folly Tree Arboretum will hold its 11th annual clam party. “Basically, our whole operating budget comes from the party,” said Tucker Marder, the arboretum’s founder. Last year there were 175 attendees. This year, he’s shooting for 200. There are two tiers of tickets. For $150, you get dinner and drinks and a raffle ticket. For $300, you get five raffle tickets. “The raffle tickets are the currency of the party,” said Mr. Marder. “People can use them to enter any event.”
Soldier fly larvae will race on an 8-by-10-inch plank of wood. If you can’t get close enough to the track, no worries, it will be filmed and simulcast on a large screen. If you’re wondering how long it takes a soldier fly larva to complete the race, Mr. Marder says usually from 30 seconds to a minute.
How did this happen? It’s not something you would figure out on your own.
“In the operations of the arboretum we have a composting program that includes raising black soldier fly larvae,” he said. “My brother [Mica] got into raising them. They can change organic matter into compost very quickly. We have these big bins, full of coffee grinds, and greens from the farm. Black soldier flies come and lay their eggs in the rotting material. When the eggs hatch, the larvae have this instinct to climb. So, we have these little ramps leading out of the bins and they climb the ramps and fall off into buckets. Then we feed them to the chickens.”
Thinking it would be funny to slide down the evolutionary ladder and begin gambling on the larvae instead of say, humans, horses, or dogs, the Marder brothers transformed the structure for them to climb out of the buckets onto a racetrack, and people gamble on the outcome.
Then there’s Goose Poop Bingo. “We’re really into ducks and geese here,” said Mr. Marder, admitting he stole the idea from a Texas bar that has a game called Chicken Shit Bingo. In Goose Poop Bingo, the floor of a goose pen is marked out with a bingo board. Onlookers buy a square and if the goose poops in their square, they win half the pot.
New this year is a snapping turtle drawing competition. Contestants buy a piece of paper, for $10, and then draw, with the help of a model, a snapper that will then be judged by Eider Marder, Mr. Marder’s 8-year-old nephew. The winner receives a $500 gift certificate to Marders.
Tickets to the party can be bought at follytreearboretum.com.
The money raised supports the collection of trees, but perhaps unsurprisingly, these aren’t regular trees. “The idea is that each tree in the arboretum has a narrative that captures your imagination,” said Mr. Marder. “We’re specifically interested in grafted cuttings, which are genetically identical to the parent plant. So, for example, we have a clone of a tree that went to the moon on Apollo 14. We have the clone of the English oak that Hitler gave to Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics.”
Two trees will be the subjects of a silent auction. One that “owns itself” (it’s a long story) and the other a clone of one of the 7,000 oak trees that the artist Joseph Beuys planted in Germany in the 1980s.
The arboretum “produces projects that address human’s relationship to the natural world as well as supports the work of others who are developing new and creative methods of environmental storytelling,” according to its website.
The property was once his grandmother’s farm, and his father, Charlie, owner of Marders in Bridgehampton, grew up there. Mica Marder now lives there. “There’s pigs and chickens and ducks and geese and soldier flies,” said Mr. Marder. “It’s a rough and tumble kind of feeling, but that gives us the opportunity to do other weird stuff on the spur of the moment. Like, we can just dig a hole.”
