Read Anne Raver
of The New York Times
© John Lei, 2007
In the Garden
“a dreamlike landscape”
Vistas and Close-ups, Staged by a Filmmaker
Duncan Brine is a Landscape Designer with a Filmmaker’s Eye
IT had been raining all day, so mist covered the trees and shrubs as we set out for a walk through Duncan and Julia Brine’s six-acre garden, a dreamlike landscape that takes its cues from the old shade trees and fence posts remaining from the farm that was once here, as well as the native plants, like black locust and joe-pye weed, that populate the hills and spring-fed marsh.
The land is part of the old Sheffield Farm, which supplied 50,000 bottles of milk a day to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s (according to the enlargement of a vintage postcard in a little restaurant in town), and the Brines have made their home and office here, in two 1920s farmhouses at the apex of the property.
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It takes exactly 27 steps for the Brines to commute from the renovated farmhouse they live in to the one where they run their business, Horticultural Design Inc., across a gravelly courtyard filled with exotic plants.
“It’s all Asian, except for the elderberry,” Mr. Brine said, as I stood nose to nose with an enormous cryptomeria, or Japanese cedar, outside the office door. “The idea was to have more exotic things close to the house, and in a deer-protected area.”
The space is fenced with a combination of coarse oak planks and locust posts, as well as an occasional Japanese umbrella pine, which the deer do not eat (here, anyway).
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Mr. Brine has broken every rule in the book by planting the cryptomeria right in front of the door. But this magnificent evergreen – a Yoshino, at least 15 feet tall and 6 feet wide – did not block my way. It was riveting, like an unbelievably handsome man, and caught me off guard. I forgot all my preconceived ideas about how to navigate this garden and simply started looking around.
There were callicarpas full of pale lavender berries, which would turn purple in the fall; viburnums and shrub dogwoods; and lacy elderberries juxtaposed against dense evergreens or the large, floppy leaves of an oakleaf hydrangea. There were specimen trees, like an English oak and sweet gum, both with variegated leaves, and mounding shrubs, like stephanandra, whose bright green, deeply incised leaves cascaded over black sedge grass.
“It’s stuffed with stuff,” Mr. Brine said, grinning at what he calls “an intentional arsenal of plants,” all knitted together, hiding the walls of the house we had just left. Otherwise “we’d have this building looming over us,” he said. “But as soon as you’re out the door, you’re in ga-ga land.”
“Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”
–Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, and author (1872-1970)
