Landscape Pleasures Offers an Insiders Look at Southamptons Ever-Changing Gardens

The garden of Margaret and R. Peter Sullivan is one of the homes featured on the Parrish Art Museums Landscape Pleasures garden tour this Sunday, June 8. Photo by Doug Young.

By Tessa Raebeck

Like a piece of artwork or a writers manuscript, a garden is never truly finished. As with all art, gardens can always evolve, changing with the seasons and naturally growing out of plans and designs, developing over time in a never-ending evolution.

Gardening is the art of the Earth, providing the willing and creative with another means of finding beauty in the mundane.

All I know is, I dont paint with a trowel or garden with a brush, the late Robert Dash said in a video by P. Allen Smith Classics filmed in 2011, two years before his death, when asked about the connection between gardening and painting.

They inform one another in ways that are very mysterious. Its how the trowel is wielded or how the brush is wielded that informs the canvas or the Earth and there are no rules. And the only way you know how to do something in either of those arts is by doing it, he added.

Mr. Dash, an artist, writer and gardener who died in September at age 82, believed very much in gardens taking their time and developing over a period of time, said Jack deLashmet, co-chair of Landscape Pleasures, which will honor Mr. Dash this year.

Hosted by the Parrish Art Museum, Landscape Pleasures includes three lectures by gardening and landscape design experts on Saturday, June 7, followed by a day of tours of some of Southamptons most historic and remarkable gardens on Sunday, June 8.

The 2-acre Sagaponack garden of Mr. Dash, the Madoo Conservancy, which is open to the public, is included among the private estates on Sundays tour.

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Landscape Pleasures Offers an Insiders Look at Southamptons Ever-Changing Gardens