Southampton - The weather was less than perfect for Guild Hall's Garden As Art tour of the gardens of several notable Hamptons artists. But the many stalwart souls who braved Saturday's deluge were rewarded with a unique opportunity to explore some unique gardens and contemplate how an artist's garden can reflect his or her artistic vision, and sometimes inspire the work as well.

Foliage plays an important part in any garden, adding texture and form through the season.

The tour began at Guild Hall, with an enlightening and informative talk, "Snake in the Grass: The Artist and the Garden," by Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, and arts commentator for WLIU radio. She was given a delightfully witty introduction by esteemed garden historian, author and educator Mac Griswold. Harrison traced the relationship between artists and gardens through history, and suggested three themes that can be found in the way artists relate to gardens. The garden can serve as metaphor, motif or monument. Examples of all three were found on the tour.

The gardens of six artists were available for viewing, and the artists were gracious enough to open their studios, too. Most were on hand and willing to talk with visitors, offering an unparalleled opportunity to learn about the connections between their gardens and their art.

The large flowers of hibiscus bloom into fall.

I'm not an artist - I'm a gardener - so I'm just going to share here some of my impressions. I do believe fervently that gardens - and gardening - can forge a deeper connection between humans and the natural world of the planet we inhabit, and that these connections can greatly enrich our lives. When artists create gardens, they bring their special vision to the creation and open our eyes to that connection in new ways.

The gardens of the featured artists are all very different, and are connected to their work in different ways.

Photographer and painter Dianne Blell's garden in Bridgehampton is formal and classical, green and serene, with meticulously clipped evergreen shrubs and trees. The spaces are beautifully composed and ordered. But there are elements of incisive wit and humor - this is not a coldly idealized garden. One area, which she calls the "fruit loop," contains peach and apple trees. Alongside her studio is an area of alternating squares of stone and neatly trimmed lawn - this is called "The Ladies' Intellectual Grid Garden." It is guarded by two "dancing fat ladies" - large, round boxwoods with spirals cut into them, reminiscent of a swirling towel. The ladies wiggle and bounce when given a push, and on Saturday they threw droplets of rain as they danced.

The garden expresses a similar feeling to much of Blell's work; she creates staged idealized photographs that look quite mythological and explore such themes as love, desire and sensuality. The photographs, like the garden, are classical but modern, with saucy humor thrown into the mix.

Plants and flowers were obviously carefully selected to thrive in the East End climate.

The garden of April Gornik and Eric Fischl in North Haven, designed by Gornik, reflects a very different vision. This garden is the setting for several of Fischl's intense figurative sculptures. When climbing the stairs to the landing between the artists' twin studios one is greeted by "Tumbling Woman," one of a series of emotionally wrenching pieces created in response to Sept. 11, 2001. The gardens are found beyond the passage between the studios, and they're full of warm, vibrant color and form. Maroon and golden coleus and chartreuse sweet potato vine fill pots in courtyards. There are golden shrubs and purple-leaved trees - shades of purple and warm gold are found throughout the garden. A cutleaf Japanese maple displays its delicate foliage against a wall. There's a small water garden spangled with diminutive waterlilies. Herbs and succulents fill niches in the courtyard's pavement.

Gornik is a painter of evocative, even mysterious, and entirely compelling landscapes that evince a close, intense relationship to nature. The garden she's created reflects her very personal and intuitive vision. There's a warmth and ease about the garden that complements and softens the strong architectural lines of the house.

Vibrant balloon flower in Roy Nicholson's garden.

Mary Heilmann's Bridgehampton garden is not complicated, and it's mostly green, feeling at one with the expansive, open field next door. That field inspires her work - she throws open the doors of her studio (a converted barn) to see the field all day long. The field supplies inspiration but not a model. Heilmann's paintings are brightly colored abstractions that riff on the rectangles and stripes of modernist painting but play with those conventions. Her paintings inject intense pinks, greens, blues and other hues, and incorporate looser lines and shapes. From that green field, Heilmann's imagination takes flight. Heilmann designs chairs, too - plywood frames with old-fashioned-looking nylon webbing in different colors - and a few share her studio.

A sense of humor shows in the paintings, and in the garden, too. The lounge chairs by the pool have camouflage-print covers. There's an outdoor shower hidden inside a grove of bamboo that forms the only curtain for bathers. Her garden feels grounded but lighthearted, and the paintings do, too.

Many of the gardens on the tour included sculptures scattered throughout the landscape.

Sculptor Bryan Hunt's garden in Wainscott is an open, rolling expanse of lawn and trees on the shore of Georgica Pond. It feels like a park - a sculpture park - and is populated by the compelling organic forms of his work. The sculptures - flowing and vertical forms in bronze, stainless steel, cast resin and concrete - inhabit the landscape. They stand among trees, sit near the edges of lawns, overlook the pond. These pieces seem very cerebral but still, somehow, organic and perfectly at home in their setting. They belong here. There's a small, rounded piece crouching at the entry to an intimate dining arbor.

Succulents between paving stones in the April Gornik and Eric Fischl garden. Photo by Anne Halpin

Next to the house are beds of annuals and perennials that are home to ephemeral living sculptures in the form of some rather statuesque cardoons. The gardens, like the works, are intriguing explorations of form and space rather than color.

The garden of painter Roy Nicholson is both very personal - he is an avid gardener and created this garden himself - and very directly connected to his work. In June he completed a series of 52 small paintings, each two by two feet, all inspired by plants in his garden. He did one painting each week, beginning with the morning of last year's summer solstice and concluding the evening of this year's solstice. The paintings now cover an entire wall of his studio.

The paintings are abstracted, some reducing the plants to lines in space (black-eyed Susans in winter) and others magnifying details (a bit of a ladyslipper orchid focusing on the delicate veins in the pouchlike flower). The images are not necessarily related to the season in which they were painted or intended to depict particular plants in representational ways. Rather, they aim to capture what was in the artist's head at the time he created the paintings. They are expressive and very personal, and show a masterful use of color.

One of the interesting sculptures on view at LongHouse Reserve, a stack of cinderblocks representing the 'urban' landscape.

Nicholson's country garden is full of color, too. Enter through the rustic wooden gate and wander paths through beds of blue, purple, and yellow flowers. Six-foot blue salvias and towering purple-pink Joe Pye weed partially obscure brilliant yellow black-eyed Susans and pink spider flowers behind them. At the end of a path there's an arbor robed in scarlet runner beans, framing a pink-and-purple fuchsia. Peeled, gnarled poles are lashed together to make tripods and tuteurs for morning glories and other vines. You have to explore to see all the plants in the garden. Passionflowers scale the back of the house and climb to a second-floor balcony outside Nicholson's studio.

The garden, like the work, does not show itself in a glance. The longer you look, the more layers reveal themselves.

Artistic placement of sculptures and shrubs made for pleasant viewing in many gardens on the tour.

Donald Sultan's garden is intimate, wrapping around his small historic house in Sag Harbor. Sultan is known for big still lifes, prints and paintings, combining bold color contrasts and large forms. His recent work includes recurring motifs of flower forms - notably poppies - against a seemingly solid ground. The works are more complicated than they appear. Instead of putting paint directly on a canvas, Sultan has used masonite and vinyl tiles, cut shapes into them, then filled the holes and painted on that.

His garden, in contrast, is quiet and serene, with controlled forms (neatly sheared boxwoods and precisely defined areas of lawn), except for a burst of purple in a border alongside a small, perfect lawn bordered with pebbles. A tiny courtyard has on one end an old, gnarled wisteria above a millstone, and on another side a small, trickling stone fountain. The garden is quiet, serene, peaceful, a graceful complement to the house that belies its setting in the middle of town.

A neatly ordered lawn in Donald Sultan's garden. Photo by Anne Halpin

Also on the tour were the bonus of three outstanding public spaces - the Pollock-Krasner House and Jack Lenor Larsen's LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, and Robert Dash's Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack. If you've never been to any of these three inspiring demonstrations of testaments to the importance of art and the life and landscape of eastern Long Island, you owe it to yourself to go see them.

And don't miss next year's Guild Hall garden tour.