This Lush Hamptons Property Challenges the Classic Rules of Gardening With Its Gutsy Plantings

There's nothing more traditional than a hydrangea—except when you use it in this form,” says New York City–based landscape architect Edmund Hollander, referring to a crisp border of the flowering shrub against a rectilinear ilex hedge. But in this modern-leaning garden, a winner of VERANDA's 2020 World's Most Beautiful Gardens, he could have easily been referring to the sweeping sprays of lavender stretching up neatly along gravel pathways. “The forms are much cleaner than you’d expect. It’s not a soft arrangement,” he adds.

The graphic design is very much an extension of the interior and architectural aesthetic of the house, which sits on four-and-a-half acres of flat farmland on Long Island’s East End. “There isn’t a place where the architecture stops and landscape begins,” says Hollander, who planned the property around two great squares: one composed of an open lawn, the other a sunken pool area designed in the spirit of Slim Aarons modernity.

“We excavated down about two feet, so you have to go downstairs to reach that room,” he says. The change in elevation makes a pool house just outside the hedge and the bosk of plane trees behind it appear elevated.

A crush of flowering grasses and shrubs brings intensity of color. “There aren’t 12 lavender plants—there are 1,200,” notes Hollander, who describes the choreography of blooms like acts in a ballet: a dance of alliums under an allée of horse chestnut trees in the spring, hydrangeas and lavender in the summer, roses in the fall.

“There’s something new blooming not just every season, but even within the course of a summer,” says Hollander. “The family comes out every weekend and in the summer, so it’s likely that with each visit, they have a new landscape to enjoy.”

2020 World's Most Beautiful Gardens winner for Freshest Flowering Landscape
Design by Hollander Design Landscape Architects, with Haynes Roberts

You Might Also Like

• Spectacular Gifts for the Most Stylish Women in Your Life

• 16 Gorgeous Indoor Plants for Homes of All Sizes