Quartz crystals in the garden.

Bridghampton - On a quiet country lane in Bridgehampton is a most remarkable garden that is a uniquely inspired melding of art and landscape. It belongs to interior designer John Barham, who created it and has nurtured it for 22 years. When he bought this property, he started making the garden before his house was built. "The architect had to work around it," he says with a twinkle in his eye.

The two-acre garden has evolved over the years. In the beginning, Barham created an orchard of apple and pear trees in the backyard. But then a neighbor planted a row of cedar trees along the property line, and they spread cedar-apple rust disease to the orchard, and the fruit trees had to be removed. Barham still misses them but, he says, their demise presented him with a new opportunity (he's a glass-half-full sort of person).

Today the garden is laid out in a series of corridors - a unique structuring of the space that makes the two acres feel - and look - far larger. Plenty of notable gardens are designed to feel like separate "rooms" separated by hedges, walls, or screens of plants. But Barham's garden has long allees, paths, and passageways that draw the eye deep into the space and invite strolling and exploration.

A corridor of light and shadow with sculpture and art.

The corridors aren't just straight lines running from one end of the property to the other. The long vistas are interrupted by pieces of sculpture, specimen trees, screens of shrubs, gates and other elements strategically positioned to stop the gaze and let the viewer's eye come to rest. The ingenious design offers new surprises and points of interest around every corner.

A shady corridor.

Art is everywhere in this garden. In expanses of lawn, around the pool, in beds and borders, on the terrace - dozens of works of art share the space with plants. There are classical sculptures, insects and animals carved in stone or cast in bronze or cement, giant quartz crystals rising from the earth, Indian river rocks. There are figurative statues like those used in Korean cemeteries, each slightly different from the next. There are African treehouse ladders - notched wooden poles that in the forests and savannahs allow humans to scramble up into a safe treehouse where lions cannot follow.

All this art, though, started with frogs. Barham was very taken with ancient stone frogs he saw in Japan, and decided to have a similar one made for his garden. Another followed, and another, and now the frogs squat in corners, next to plants, and in spots on the lawn.

The garden is rich and varied in plant life, but several horticultural themes recur. One of his favorite plants in the golden sequoia, which adds a bright vertical accent throughout the landscape. Barham keeps them neatly trimmed ("if it's not trimmed, he confides, "it becomes scraggly and ugly"). The chartreuse/gold foliage shines like a beacon in the landscape.

African treehouse ladders.

Another favorite is Japanese painted fern, whose elegant fronds with their maroon midribs are overlaid with silver. "It is so lush and lovely," he says. He loves to mass ferns around the base of tree trunks. He uses plants to soften other vertical lines in the garden, too. There are many birdhouses mounted atop tall poles, and he trains clematis and climbing hydrangea up the poles.

The garden's predominant color scheme is purple, yellow and white, with the occasional touch of pink or blue. Beds and borders are neatly framed with boxwood that functions "like a frame for a picture," says Barham. He uses only the cultivar Green Velvet because, he says, the foliage never "burns" (browns) in winter. He has tried many varieties of boxwood over the years, and this is the only one he's found that stays reliably green throughout the Bridgehampton winter.

Along one side of the property stretches an expanse of white azaleas that were at their peak of bloom in early May. They are stunning - a long ribbon of snowy white backed by deep green foliage.

Golden sequoias light up a bed.

There are many more horticultural delights here. Stately southern magnolia blooms all summer. A beautyberry (Callicarpa) that grows wild in Virginia has been planted here, and decks itself with many clusters of showy purple berries in fall. A stretch of bluebells lines a grass path in a shady corridor near the pool. An unusual chestnut with pink flower clusters blooms in spring, echoing the color of nearby azaleas - such inspired pairings occur throughout this magical garden.

This garden - so personal and so beautiful in all its details - could only have been created by the passion of a lifetime. Nothing, says Barham, gives him greater pleasure than gardening. It shows.