a towering Australian monkey puzzle tree. (Anne Halpin)

Southampton - In June design and garden aficionados across the Hamptons await the Parrish Art Museum's annual Landscape Pleasures weekend. This year's event, titled "Inside/Outside," took place on Saturday and Sunday, June 11 and June 12.

The Saturday symposium featured four distinguished interior designers and Sunday was devoted to self-guided tours of four private gardens of other celebrated designers and architects. We tourists had an opportunity to see how interior designers express their visual language in their outdoor spaces. Two of the gardens were strictly outdoor experiences, and the other two offered a look at both house and garden. All were inspiring.

Perfect Serenity In East Hampton
The expansive (almost five-acre) garden of Tony Ingrao and Randy Kemper is a world of its own. In this idealized composition of form and texture, every detail is perfect. Spiral topiaries frame a view of a broad lawn. A bend in the red-gravel drive reveals the sculptural drama of a towering Australian monkey puzzle tree.

Marty And Blossom Gluck welcome visitors to the Barman/Graham Garden in Sagaponack. (Anne Halpin)

Throughout this meticulously curated and maintained landscape, a population of perfectly shaped Japanese maples takes on an ethereal quality; they look so perfect they seem unreal. Some trees punctuate the lawn like living sculptures; others are full of movement, like a weeping spruce that flows over a lawn like water. Along edges and boundaries plants are carefully layered into textural walls of greenery.

Architectural elements play as important a part in this landscape as plants and work in concert with them. Paths, walkways and stairs are marked by pairs of stone balls or sphinxes or statues. There are sculptures and benches and follies to discover.

Closer to the house, more color appears in the form of blue scaevola in planters. A walled courtyard laid out in boxwood parterres around a central pool encircled by water spouts hosts blue and purple flowers - hardy geranium, heliotrope, angelonia and nepeta. Trachelospermum covers a wall with its starry white flowers and glossy green foliage, and a dining area is framed by carefully trained white-flowered mandevilla vines. Perfect serenity.


Tranquility Near The Sea
In Sagaponack the carefully crafted garden of John Barman and Kelly Graham visually links the intimate spaces around the shingled house with the farm fields and ultimately, the sea, beyond. As a result, the property feels much bigger than its true .9 acre size, stretching toward the sea below the open sky.

Neat, high classic privet hedges line the driveway and parking area, as well as a patio and the pool area. The landscape is mostly green. An intimate garden linking the pool to the house includes freshening touches of white astilbe and yarrow and, later in the season, mounds of Montauk daisies. There's also the succulent foliage of sedum for contrast and later color, some honeysuckle, daylily and the hardy hibiscus known as rose-of-Sharon.

This elegantly understated garden beautifully complements the art-filled interior of the house and creates a graceful transition to the flat, orderly landscape of the farm field and the natural environment beyond that. It's a spacious and peaceful setting.

A Wilderness Tamed In Sag Harbor
Steven Gambrel's Sag Harbor property has undergone a renaissance. The house was rundown and the property a brushy mess when he purchased it after 9/11. But now the patio behind the beautifully renovated house overlooks a wide lawn, ringed with plantings, that slopes gently down toward Sag Harbor Cove. Many of the plantings here are green. Boxwoods predominate - they can tolerate the salty winds that blow off the cove, and lend themselves to neat clipping. Boxwoods cluster in groups here - near the water, in borders along the property lines, in containers on the stone terraces.



The hand of the gardener is evident throughout this carefully maintained landscape. In a roofed seating area adjacent to the house staghorn ferns on wood plaques inhabit one wall. On a stone terrace there are fragrant topiary standards of bay and gardenia. Along one side of the lawn, once-espaliered apple trees spread their horizontal branches in a row linking the water to an inviting stone boathouse (it's really a barn, but it feels like a boathouse, complete with award ribbons).

Metal Hyacinth and Blue Candles in Southampton. (Anne Halpin)

Gothic Romance With A Touch Of Whimsy
Most visitors to Southampton sooner or later discover "the castle." Built in the early 1900s, Balcastle is now owned by William Sofield (one of the speakers at the Saturday symposium) and Dennis Anderson. The house looks like a fairytale castle - an Irish Gothic structure complete with crenellations. Such a dramatic building needs a unique garden around it, and Sofield has created one. The lush, romantic plantings around the house and pool blend hardy and tropical plants in a carefully woven tapestry of form and color. Tall English oaks tower overhead, with cryptomeria, hollies and boxwoods beneath: classic temperate-climate woody plants. But there are also palms and petasites and other plants from tropical climes. And there are enchanting touches from the land of imagination, too. Pale blue hyacinths in a pot with real foliage are made of metal. A still life on a table combines a large white coral and a blue candle with an old boat propeller. There are lots of guttered blue candles left on outdoor tables, suggestive of late-night talks and glasses of wine. A romantic place indeed.