Tight Little Island

If you had to say to someone in Maine that you were taking the ferry to Long Island to visit public gardens, they look at you and think: "What public gardens?" They conjure up images of a pre- post in Casco Bay populated by people who fish for a living and have little time in the garden, and by summer residents who might have a small vegetable garden, flower garden and hedges rugosa rose. But the gardens Public We have nothing like that. It is a single place where the word "conspicuous" is not used very often. I love Long Island, Maine - my kind of people and my type of gardens.

Last year, I was asked to go to the "other" from Long Island, the largest island next to New York for a day. Having never been there - and based on some of the things I had read about the Hamptons, I will visit the area - I was not really looking forward to it. Who wants to drive all day, take a ferry, then a little more practice to see "McMansions" or mix in a restaurant with expensive high rollers from New York? I made the trip, however, and although it was very different from Long Island, Maine, this was not what I had imagined.

I had some time to kill before taking the ferry from New London in Connecticut, so I took a moment to see the new garden filled with Athens in a downtown pocket park. With a Greek-inspired mural and sculptures, it was worth the visit. If you have more time to spend in New London, a half-day to visit the Connecticut College Arboretum is also a must.

The ferry to Long Island Sound to Orient Point proved agreeable to 1,000 passengers aboard the MV John H. There were many interesting sights, including lighthouses and the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Conn., where submarines are built and maintained for the U.S. Navy. A submarine has adopted the ferry - something I had never seen in Casco Bay!

The landing of the ferry, I was ready for the pomp and glitter of Long Island. The first hour of driving, however, has been through rural agricultural county of Suffolk, the county's leading farm in New York. Tomatoes were ripe on the vine and the potatoes have been dug. After a ferry ride from Shelter Island, I pulled into Bridgehampton, where BMW, Jaguar and Mercedes replaced tractors John Deere one hour earlier.

No celebrities have been spotted, but I was immediately taken by the miles of privet, Ligustrum spp. Most of them carved with sharp corners. They delineated property lines and prevented anyone from seeing through them or over them. I became fascinated by the hedges and I tried searching Vincent Simone, a local expert woody plant whose books I've reviewed this year in early spring PPP issue. Unfortunately, I could not contact him until my return to Maine (see box). On all the roads I traveled, the size of teams high on the scales used to sculpt the hedge privet naturally lanky into something that seemed almost perfect. Back in Maine, Long Island, a privet hedge can only be cut once a year, and sometimes to be a chainsaw.

I quickly came to the conser-Madoo Vancy in Sagaponack and the gardens of Robert Dash, who is probably best known as an artist whose medium is fabric. I quickly discovered that the character of many talents - I will use the term "man", but I knew he would not approve - had a strange eye for landscape development.

"I do not paint the way I garden

and the garden I would like to use the brush, although the process is often the same - both are arts wrist broadest, most kind of signature, if you will, very strange, the result of a lot to do, many stumbling blocks, and very intuitively turns and twists until everything fits and adheres to the scale of its intention, "Dash wrote in notes Madoo: Making a Gar.