Lula’s Garden

Four Alberta spruces and a boxwood hedge lead the way from driveway to front door

GOT ME A NEW CAMERA, but it’s not out of the box yet (I’m a little slow to adopt new technology, even when it’s sitting on my dining table). It’s a Canon S95, on the theory that the best camera for a blogger is the one you have with you, and this camera is light.

Meanwhile, stalling for time, I hereby present some shots of 2-3 weeks ago, taken with a loaner camera, of a cottage and garden belonging to my friend Lula here in Springs, Long Island, N.Y.

Lula is a professional garden designer who has worked on spaces both public and private, and she’s been working on her own piece of the planet for half a dozen years. I very much admire its variety, color, and organization.

Curving beds around the edge of the lawn and a garden through the woods, traversed by a stepping-stone path, below, exploit all things shade-tolerant and deer-resistant, including pieris, bleeding hearts, brunnera, ferns, cranesbill, and much more. The red Japanese maple near the house is a show-stopper. As for the rhodies, Lula swears by Deer-Out.

A Bridge Not Far Enough

IT’S PROBABLY BECAUSE I WAS SO THOROUGHLY WOWED by a recent visit to LongHouse Reserve, a 16-acre masterpiece of landscape design, that Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton, N.Y., a 22-year-old, five-acre garden designed by Jim Kilpatric and Harry Neyens and recently donated to the Peconic Land Trust, struck me as a bit underwhelming.

The layout seems to break one of the most hallowed rules of garden design, which is that the whole thing should not be revealed all at once. At Bridge Gardens, once you’re through an impressive perimeter hedge of European beech, above, the majority of the property is right there before you: a vast stretch of lawn with a lavender parterre and a rose rondel, top, with some 800 species of antique and modern roses (great if you’re a rose aficionado — I’m not). That’s the Outer Garden, which also includes a bank of lilacs in fragrant bloom and a fun collection of yew topiaries, below.

The Inner Garden, around a post-modern building that is the gardener’s residence and an education center, was more interesting to me, particularly a meticulous multi-colored knot garden, below, mulched with broken clam shells. There’s a reflecting pool, a ‘bamboo room,’ and a woodland garden area to explore.

It took my friend Debre and me less than an hour to explore it all, and we were dilly-dallying.

Bridge Gardens would be a wonderful venue for a wedding or big party (it’s available for hire), with all that open space, and serious plantspeople will find much to fascinate them, but as a work of inspiring landscape design, it didn’t knock this jaded garden-tourist out.