Reinventing Grey Gardens: A Drawn-Out Drama in Itself Robert J. Eckholm OASIS Grey Gardens, in views from the house to the ocean, has come far si

LIMELIGHT, at least the reflected kind, is again shining on Grey Gardens, a 10-bedroom 1897 house near Georgica Pond here. Thirty-four years after its former residents, Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie, and her namesake daughter, who was called Little Edie, were introduced to the world in the Maysles brothers’ classic documentary, and three years after their life in the tumbledown raccoon-infested mansion on a wildly overgrown lot became the basis of a Broadway musical, HBO is rolling out a feature-length movie about them, also called “Grey Gardens,” this weekend. 

The two Edies have become famous for the way they lived at Grey Gardens — the squalor of their home was especially striking given that Big Edie was an aunt and Little Edie a first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — and they will soon be even better known after being portrayed by Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore in the HBO film.

The house’s current owners, who restored it after buying it from Little Edie in 1979, are celebrities themselves: Sally Quinn, the writer and Washington hostess, and her husband, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the former editor of The Washington Post. The couple have taken up residence at Grey Gardens every summer for decades, and have used it to entertain friends like Lauren Bacall and Norman Lear.

But one person intimately involved with the property is unlikely to be known to even the most hard-core Grey Gardens buff. For 23 years, Victoria Fensterer, an artist who designed and maintains the current gardens, has worked year round to preserve something of the wild spirit of the Beales’ Grey Gardens, on grounds that can nevertheless be navigated. “It is so lush, it’s on the edge of becoming decadent,” said Eden Rafshoon, a retired interior designer who has visited the Bradlees every summer for the last decade. “It’s extremely romantic, it’s very fragrant, and it’s extremely sensuous. It’s full of secret garden rooms and mystery.”

Ms. Fensterer began working on the property in the mid-1980s, several years after a bulldozer had cleared its two acres of the dense thicket of prickly aralia spinosa, commonly called devil’s walking stick, that had overtaken it. Early on, Ms. Quinn and Mr. Bradlee hired a gardener to plant a circle of flowers and two rows of apple trees near the house, but the results were far from what Ms. Quinn had envisioned. “It looked like a new garden,” she said, “but I wanted it to be wild. I wanted it to be just on the verge of being over the top. I wanted it to look like it happened by itself. I didn’t want it to be manicured in any way, because the house isn’t that way.”

Ms. Quinn met Ms. Fensterer in the summer of 1985 during a visit to her friends and next-door neighbors, the writers Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, for whom she had just planted several flower gardens.

Then 39, Ms. Fensterer had only recently begun working as a professional gardener. Although she had grown up tending delphiniums, roses, wisteria and apples in the backyard of her childhood home in Queens, she had studied sculpture in college and spent her 20s and 30s as a vagabond painter and blues singer, traveling in Europe and taking road trips across the United States in a Volkswagen bus. It wasn’t until she planted her front yard in Amagansett, N.Y., the town where she had moved in 1979, that she began to recognize gardening as a practice at which she could make the most of her strong senses of color, proportion and texture.

Her romantic cottage garden attracted the attention of several neighbors who asked if her services were available for hire, including one who knew Ms. Ephron. 

In the months after Ms. Quinn hired her, Ms. Fensterer began studying the site, with the intention of beginning to plant in the spring of 1986. Clearing the immense thicket had revealed that the rectangular property, with the house at the center, was made up of several sections. Behind the house on the right was a wide-open space where Mr. Bradlee and Ms. Quinn had installed a swimming pool. Three tall privet hedges that had survived the bulldozing outlined an area to the left of the pool where Little Edie had said in the documentary that she had wanted a vegetable garden. And next to the house on the right was a cement wall enclosing a square the size of the house itself, which the original owner built to protect a flower garden and that had given the property its name. 

That winter, Ms. Fensterer walked the property, took photographs, and sketched plans that she sent to Ms. Quinn and Mr. Bradlee. “It needed structure and dimension,” she said. “It needed more mystery. The patina on the walls suggests an ancient, Old World garden, but the garden was missing.” 

As soon as it became warm enough to begin planting, Ms. Fensterer began tackling the property in stages.

First, she wanted to somehow enfold the area around the pool, which “seemed to just stick out in the middle of vast empty space,” Ms. Fensterer said. She anchored the corners with dense Pfitzer junipers, which have a dark, lacy quality, and planted layers of flowering shrubs including several species of hydrangea, white rose of Sharon, and lavender blue vitex, which give the pool a sense of privacy and enclosure.

Then she planted two upright evergreens to demarcate the entrance to a thatched cottage just beyond the cement wall that had also survived the clear-cutting, and surrounded it with tall flowers like loosestrifes, foxgloves, hostas and hollyhocks.

Next, in the area defined by the hedges, she created a narrow path that opens to a small patio in the back by rearranging stone pavers that had been placed there. “I always think about how people are going to move through a space, and you want to create opportunities to discover things,” Ms. Fensterer said. She also cut two strategic openings in the hedge to give visitors glimpses of the pool and beyond.

The following year she took on the walled garden, replacing the circle of flowers with a small expanse of open grass encircled by a 12-foot-deep ring of flowers. In summer, when the flowers are in bloom, they provide a shield of privacy for anyone sitting in two pale blue Adirondack chairs in the middle. “I would say there’s a numinous quality about it,” Ms. Quinn said of the ring. 

Once that was done, Ms. Fensterer suggested the couple invest in mature trees that would give the landscaping the feeling of having been there for centuries. Three curly willows and a Japanese sephora were installed between the house and the pool, creating a dramatic frame for the grounds. And about a dozen evergreens were used to define spaces and create small settings for other plants of interest. “I like to create spaces that draw you in and then when you go there, it might frame another view,” Ms. Fensterer said. “It’s like a discovery, and once you get there, you might be able to sit there and linger.”

In the years that followed, Ms. Fensterer watched as the plants grew, observing and responding to their evolving relationships. “You have to guide the growth, and as the limbs grow, you prune them to emphasize shapes,” Ms. Fensterer said. “It’s like sculpting.”

Although Ms. Quinn and Ms. Fensterer both said they nearly always agreed on purchases and plantings, tensions arose briefly in the late 1990s after Mr. Bradlee installed a tennis court behind the pool and Ms. Fensterer said his idea to transplant a few hydrangeas as camouflage wasn’t enough to hide the metal fence. “It looked like there was a two-lane highway running through,” she said. Mr. Bradlee, who declined to say how much the couple pays to maintain the grounds, wasn’t thrilled by the idea of extra plantings. “You know, I was worried that it was costing a lot of dough. Period,” Mr. Bradlee said.

Eventually, Ms. Fensterer’s concerns won out, although Mr. Bradlee didn’t let her forget there were limits on how much he and his wife were willing to spend beyond the regular budget. Among the many notes Mr. Bradlee sent with his payments was one that teased, “I’m not John D. Rockefeller, and these are not the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.”

Now that Ms. Fensterer’s composition has had more than two decades to mature, the shaded nooks are even more hidden, the billowing flower beds are even more billowy, and the trees have become “characters,” to Ms. Fensterer’s way of thinking. 

“I can’t imagine the garden was ever as beautiful as it is now,” Ms. Ephron said. “It’s truly a magical place. It’s one beautiful space after another, all of it very English — very, you know, pinks and lavenders. I’ve never seen a picture of it that ever conveyed how amazing it is because, in some way, it’s a sort of a distant cousin to the wildness that was there when the Bradlees bought the house.” 

In the Maysles brothers’ film, Big Edie proclaims, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to leave here.” Pary Williamson, a 32-year-old yoga instructor who is dating Ms. Quinn’s and Mr. Bradlee’s son, Quinn Bradlee, was unaware of the echo in her reaction to the place, which she saw for the first time last weekend

“It’s like something from a fairy tale — it just doesn’t seem real,” Ms. Williamson said. “I didn’t want to leave.”