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| A Landscape Designer’s Wild Garden | A Landscape Designer’s Wild Garden |
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| At her Long Island home, Deborah Nevins finds respite from the opulent environments she’s celebrated for creating. | At her Long Island home, Deborah Nevins finds respite from the opulent environments she’s celebrated for creating. |
| By Nancy Hass | By Nancy Hass |
| THE NEW YORK-BASED landscape designer Deborah Nevins spends much of her time taming profusion. Over her three-decade career, she has created gardens for Tommy Hilfiger, David Geffen and Michael Eisner — and almost nothing is out of bounds. | THE NEW YORK-BASED landscape designer Deborah Nevins spends much of her time taming profusion. Over her three-decade career, she has created gardens for Tommy Hilfiger, David Geffen and Michael Eisner — and almost nothing is out of bounds. |
| Her carefully structured yet naturalistic environments are known for their subtle Blakeian radiance. In a collaboration with the Italian designer Renzo Piano’s firm for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, which was completed in 2016, she turned a 42-acre section of a former parking lot for the Olympics into a public green space with 1,500 olive, pine, almond and pomegranate trees interspersed with more than 300,000 perennials and shrubs, including Jerusalem sage and fragrant yellow-blooming coronilla; in the late 1980s, at the Southampton estate of the art collector Paul Walter, she installed roughly 140 feet of copper beech hedge and a pair of soaring cedars trimmed to look like Italian cypress that became as well-known as his accretion of late 19th-century photography and Indian miniature paintings. While contemporary landscape designers rarely have the name recognition of architects (as they did during the late 19th-century era that Edith Wharton conjures, when wealthy patrons were as obsessed with collecting plants as they were constructing mansions), Nevins is among the few who inspire reverence. | Her carefully structured yet naturalistic environments are known for their subtle Blakeian radiance. In a collaboration with the Italian designer Renzo Piano’s firm for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, which was completed in 2016, she turned a 42-acre section of a former parking lot for the Olympics into a public green space with 1,500 olive, pine, almond and pomegranate trees interspersed with more than 300,000 perennials and shrubs, including Jerusalem sage and fragrant yellow-blooming coronilla; in the late 1980s, at the Southampton estate of the art collector Paul Walter, she installed roughly 140 feet of copper beech hedge and a pair of soaring cedars trimmed to look like Italian cypress that became as well-known as his accretion of late 19th-century photography and Indian miniature paintings. While contemporary landscape designers rarely have the name recognition of architects (as they did during the late 19th-century era that Edith Wharton conjures, when wealthy patrons were as obsessed with collecting plants as they were constructing mansions), Nevins is among the few who inspire reverence. |
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| Still, going all-out, as is her métier, can be enervating; it requires making constant, ambitious decisions, traveling frequently and meeting repeatedly with high-energy clients. When you are, like Nevins, contemplative and scholarly — she has a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University and only started a career making gardens after a decade of lecturing on landscape history at Barnard College and the Cooper Hewitt museum — it’s not difficult to believe you would want to spend your off hours in a simple place of your own, on a bench surrounded by a tall, squared-off hedge, cooking with herbs from your kitchen plot and savoring the tangy perfume of lemon trees in terra-cotta pots. | Still, going all-out, as is her métier, can be enervating; it requires making constant, ambitious decisions, traveling frequently and meeting repeatedly with high-energy clients. When you are, like Nevins, contemplative and scholarly — she has a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University and only started a career making gardens after a decade of lecturing on landscape history at Barnard College and the Cooper Hewitt museum — it’s not difficult to believe you would want to spend your off hours in a simple place of your own, on a bench surrounded by a tall, squared-off hedge, cooking with herbs from your kitchen plot and savoring the tangy perfume of lemon trees in terra-cotta pots. |
| So it’s hardly surprising that the 1,700-square-foot two-bedroom house Nevins had built for herself two decades ago on the East End of Long Island favors serenity over ostentation. The scrupulously plain two-story box with pitched roof and white cedar shingles is the locus of an understated two-acre spread that reflects Nevins’s nuanced personal style: rigorous yet unmannered, brainy but comforting. The garden, which incorporates mostly English traditions, including all-green rooms created from clipped hornbeam, is complemented by the house’s Nantucket-style simplicity. In the proportions and harmonies of the site, you can see traces of the legendary gardens that influence her work (but on a more human scale): the tension between formal and wild areas at St. Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire, the childhood country home of the Queen Mother; the tall trees of Hidcote, the early 20th-century Gloucestershire estate of the American banking heir and plantsman Lawrence Johnston; and the riotous bounty of Ninfa, created in the late 19th century by members of the noble Caetani family on the ruins of a medieval town in Lazio, Italy. | So it’s hardly surprising that the 1,700-square-foot two-bedroom house Nevins had built for herself two decades ago on the East End of Long Island favors serenity over ostentation. The scrupulously plain two-story box with pitched roof and white cedar shingles is the locus of an understated two-acre spread that reflects Nevins’s nuanced personal style: rigorous yet unmannered, brainy but comforting. The garden, which incorporates mostly English traditions, including all-green rooms created from clipped hornbeam, is complemented by the house’s Nantucket-style simplicity. In the proportions and harmonies of the site, you can see traces of the legendary gardens that influence her work (but on a more human scale): the tension between formal and wild areas at St. Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire, the childhood country home of the Queen Mother; the tall trees of Hidcote, the early 20th-century Gloucestershire estate of the American banking heir and plantsman Lawrence Johnston; and the riotous bounty of Ninfa, created in the late 19th century by members of the noble Caetani family on the ruins of a medieval town in Lazio, Italy. |
| EVEN IN THE PLANNING stages of Nevins’s home, the garden came first. When she purchased the land, it was largely overgrown, a tangled mass of trees and scrub. But once she cleared some brush, she discovered several stately old oaks and giant cedars; she built the house and gardens to maximize their impact while leaving the perimeter wild. Now, every way you look — down the paths, past the garden rooms and beds, beyond the exuberant rose bushes — your eye lands on one of those towering trees in the middle distance. “Your eye is relaxed but excited by seeing it all within a frame,” she says. | EVEN IN THE PLANNING stages of Nevins’s home, the garden came first. When she purchased the land, it was largely overgrown, a tangled mass of trees and scrub. But once she cleared some brush, she discovered several stately old oaks and giant cedars; she built the house and gardens to maximize their impact while leaving the perimeter wild. Now, every way you look — down the paths, past the garden rooms and beds, beyond the exuberant rose bushes — your eye lands on one of those towering trees in the middle distance. “Your eye is relaxed but excited by seeing it all within a frame,” she says. |
| Although Nevins is a Modernist, faithful to monochromatic structures in dialogue with architecture, she recognizes that contrast, balance and strategically deployed color are what make a garden as pleasurable as it is striking. Having collaborated over the years with both minimalists like Renzo Piano and maximalists including Gil Schafer, who specializes in traditional American homes that recall the horse farms of New York’s Hudson Valley, her own environment is an alchemically scaled series of discrete experiences, each section designed to evoke its own set of emotions. There is the subdued elegance of enclosures of privet and boxwood, a walk through bushy shrub roses, including striking white Mary Manners and pale pink-tinged Dupontii, paths through beds with tall spectacular flowering foxglove, linaria and hollyhock. The woodland beyond the borders of hedge has been tamed just enough to let sweet-scented mock orange and white cow parsley remain visible. | Although Nevins is a Modernist, faithful to monochromatic structures in dialogue with architecture, she recognizes that contrast, balance and strategically deployed color are what make a garden as pleasurable as it is striking. Having collaborated over the years with both minimalists like Renzo Piano and maximalists including Gil Schafer, who specializes in traditional American homes that recall the horse farms of New York’s Hudson Valley, her own environment is an alchemically scaled series of discrete experiences, each section designed to evoke its own set of emotions. There is the subdued elegance of enclosures of privet and boxwood, a walk through bushy shrub roses, including striking white Mary Manners and pale pink-tinged Dupontii, paths through beds with tall spectacular flowering foxglove, linaria and hollyhock. The woodland beyond the borders of hedge has been tamed just enough to let sweet-scented mock orange and white cow parsley remain visible. |
| Her garden also reflects a profound understanding of her own perfectionism, of how she prefers to live. For instance, many gardeners plant their showy flowering borders front and center, to be admired from the inside, whereas Nevins placed her perennials on the side of the house. “It would drive me crazy to look out and see them all the time, to know they need to be weeded,” she says. The flowers she chooses are never precious; rather, she favors species plants like the feathery Macleaya cordata, known as plume poppy, and the gangly, speckled-orange native swamp lily. She eschews as well most newly created dwarf hybrids that allow suburban gardeners to create tiny tableaus, instead embracing robust height in plants like Queen Anne’s lace and purple-magenta ironweed. And while the trend today at garden centers is for flamboyant, fuller flowers, which are often hybrids, she has chosen mostly single blooms, like the white Paeonia emodi, a peony with a sparse petal arrangement that is “more aesthetically pure,” Nevins says. Even the rarer plants she cultivates have a low-key grace, including a purple strain of Caryopteris divaricata, a four-foot-tall Himalayan native with a baroque curlicue violet flower that attracts legions of butterflies. | Her garden also reflects a profound understanding of her own perfectionism, of how she prefers to live. For instance, many gardeners plant their showy flowering borders front and center, to be admired from the inside, whereas Nevins placed her perennials on the side of the house. “It would drive me crazy to look out and see them all the time, to know they need to be weeded,” she says. The flowers she chooses are never precious; rather, she favors species plants like the feathery Macleaya cordata, known as plume poppy, and the gangly, speckled-orange native swamp lily. She eschews as well most newly created dwarf hybrids that allow suburban gardeners to create tiny tableaus, instead embracing robust height in plants like Queen Anne’s lace and purple-magenta ironweed. And while the trend today at garden centers is for flamboyant, fuller flowers, which are often hybrids, she has chosen mostly single blooms, like the white Paeonia emodi, a peony with a sparse petal arrangement that is “more aesthetically pure,” Nevins says. Even the rarer plants she cultivates have a low-key grace, including a purple strain of Caryopteris divaricata, a four-foot-tall Himalayan native with a baroque curlicue violet flower that attracts legions of butterflies. |
| Such purity resonates as well in the highly structured green-on-green areas of the garden, created from hornbeam, privet, boxwood and yew trees — a quilt of forest, hunter and jade. Nevins also uses sycamores, with their distinctive camouflage-like bark, to create airy structures: On the south side of the house, there is a double row of them that conjures a leafy veranda; outside the back door, two rows of three — trimmed from the top so they will spread — shade a gravel and bluestone patio furnished with a plank table and chairs. | Such purity resonates as well in the highly structured green-on-green areas of the garden, created from hornbeam, privet, boxwood and yew trees — a quilt of forest, hunter and jade. Nevins also uses sycamores, with their distinctive camouflage-like bark, to create airy structures: On the south side of the house, there is a double row of them that conjures a leafy veranda; outside the back door, two rows of three — trimmed from the top so they will spread — shade a gravel and bluestone patio furnished with a plank table and chairs. |
| While it is popular now to build a house that blurs the distinction between outside and in, that usually requires massive sliding doors — which would preclude the almost monklike approach Nevins has taken with her home, where she lives alone, designed in collaboration with the New Haven architect Peter de Bretteville. It recalls the residences of the austere late-colonial era, which had strict threshold boundaries in order to keep the domestic sphere free of everyday grit. But Nevins has found her own way to meld the past and the present, to make the home and its garden a unified field: Throughout the main level, there are eight narrow nine-foot-tall triple-hung windows that extend to the floor. Her inspiration was Thomas Jefferson — another Francophilic architectural and botanical obsessive — who created similar ones for Monticello. | While it is popular now to build a house that blurs the distinction between outside and in, that usually requires massive sliding doors — which would preclude the almost monklike approach Nevins has taken with her home, where she lives alone, designed in collaboration with the New Haven architect Peter de Bretteville. It recalls the residences of the austere late-colonial era, which had strict threshold boundaries in order to keep the domestic sphere free of everyday grit. But Nevins has found her own way to meld the past and the present, to make the home and its garden a unified field: Throughout the main level, there are eight narrow nine-foot-tall triple-hung windows that extend to the floor. Her inspiration was Thomas Jefferson — another Francophilic architectural and botanical obsessive — who created similar ones for Monticello. |
| Not only do they allow incomparable airflow through the 20-by-28-foot sitting-cum-dining room, which is decorated with spare arrangements of white upholstered and slipcovered furniture, but on a Sunday afternoon, as the weather grows cold, such windows also enable one of Nevins’s favorite rituals: She throws them open entirely, hauling in her two potted Meyer lemon trees to overwinter inside. For a few hours, before she returns to Manhattan for the workweek and a peripatetic existence planning other people’s fantasies, she is in the midst of her own orangery. As the sun sets, she is quiet by the fire with its pale wooden mantel, a fresh-cut bunch of rosemary in an antique glass vase beside her, first frost glinting, sharp and alive, on the hedgerow beyond. | Not only do they allow incomparable airflow through the 20-by-28-foot sitting-cum-dining room, which is decorated with spare arrangements of white upholstered and slipcovered furniture, but on a Sunday afternoon, as the weather grows cold, such windows also enable one of Nevins’s favorite rituals: She throws them open entirely, hauling in her two potted Meyer lemon trees to overwinter inside. For a few hours, before she returns to Manhattan for the workweek and a peripatetic existence planning other people’s fantasies, she is in the midst of her own orangery. As the sun sets, she is quiet by the fire with its pale wooden mantel, a fresh-cut bunch of rosemary in an antique glass vase beside her, first frost glinting, sharp and alive, on the hedgerow beyond. |
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