Land as Canvas, Plants as Paint

MANY contemporary artists move among a variety of mediums, and for those lucky enough to have outdoor space, landscape often becomes one of them. On Aug. 29 Guild Hall, the performing and visual arts center in East Hampton, N.Y., will conduct a tour of several artists’ gardens on the East End of Long Island. Although tickets are priced at Hamptons rates — $100 for nonmembers; $500 for those who also want a lecture, lunch and a cocktail party — the event is a reminder even to have-nots of the aesthetic potential of earth and plant life. Here, three artists’ gardens in the area (two of which will be on the tour) offer evidence of what can happen when a distinct artistic vision connects with natural, growing forms.

Dianne Blell, Photographer

LIKE her highly stylized photographs of models against painted backdrops, Dianne Blell’s Bridgehampton garden, above, has the inherent yet somehow suppressed drama of a theatrical stage set. In this fairyland of English dwarf boxwoods, Irish yews and old tangled bittersweet vine fashioned into garden arches, nature’s caprices are tamed by obsessive clipping, shaping and rearranging. As in pieces like “Courting the Beloved,” above right, classical symmetry and architectural columns combine with whimsical personal flourishes like the garden’s animal statues. And everything but the grass appears trained to perfection. “I don’t try to keep a perfect lawn,” said Ms. Blell, who welcomes the intrusions of clover and moss. “It’s my great medievalist gesture: Just let it be.”

In this year of persistent rains Ms. Blell’s exacting standards have led to a full-scale battle in her rose bed. The crisis began when, after considerable fertilizing and cutting back, her first blossoms didn’t open. Upon close inspection she discovered little spiders and insects eating the insides of the buds. “I said, ‘All right you win, but I’m going to get you,’ ” she said. “I resorted to lethal methods.”

During a recent visit there were fresh buds on her roses. Her “Intellectual Ladies Grid Garden,” with its cement-and-grass checkerboard pattern, appeared lush and green. And her “Melancholy Garden,” where, she said, “every tree and plant is weeping,” was also thriving.

Ms. Blell bought the property in 1993. After excavating 6,000 square feet of concrete from her back yard, she began gardening from scratch. Now green ivy grows up the cedar shingles of her house to an octagonal sleeping porch, where she confessed, “I have this fantasy of letting my hair down, like Rapunzel.”

Keith Sonnier, Sculptor

WHEN the sculptor Keith Sonnier first laid eyes on what was then a 150-foot tulip tree in the front yard of a farmhouse in Sagaponack 21 ago, he said recently, “it was so majestic, so huge,” that he immediately made an offer on the property. And when he landscaped the “exceedingly overgrown” two-acre grounds, Mr. Sonnier, who grew up near his grandmother’s sugar cane and cotton farm in Louisiana, opted for a somewhat wild, even baroque, aesthetic.

Now his garden (which is not on the Guild Hall tour) retains elements of its own past — a venerable Japanese maple, an unruly lilac grove and an orchard of ficus trees all but consumed by ivy — while also serving as a record of Mr. Sonnier’s evolving interests. After travels to India and Japan in the early 1980s, for example, he began incorporating bamboo and a variety of Asian woods into his sculptures, and he has cultivated several varieties of bamboo and a grove of miniature Japanese maples in his garden. And the interest in hybrids evident in the garden also shows up in many of his sculptures like his 1981 “Sarasvati,” left, in which he endowed bamboo, a type of grass, with treelike qualities like branching systems. Conversely, his maple and cedar sculptures typically rely on multiple supports, which resemble the spreading root systems of bamboo.

His vegetable garden combines Asian herbs like lemongrass and shiso with Southern staples like collard and turnip greens.

“My garden was built around that big tulip tree,” he said. “When it blooms, it has this wonderful orange flower. And the leaf looks — curiously — very much like a maple.”

Bryan Hunt, Sculptor

THE sculptor Bryan Hunt thinks of his lush waterfront property, in Wainscott, “more as a landscape than a garden.” On further reflection, referring to a grove of his cast-metal works, some of which, like the one above, rise 10 feet among distinguished oaks and elms, Mr. Hunt said recently, “I guess I grow sculptures.”

In a small garden, nestled between his house and studio, Mr. Hunt also grows perennials, vegetables and a mix of leafy annuals, which he plants each May. Nearby a raised wooden gazebo with outdoor seating is shaded by a tangle of concord grapes and roses.

Although he keeps an apartment in TriBeCa, Mr. Hunt spends seven months a year here, making pieces like “Flume I,” above, in a converted-barn studio with expansive views of Georgica Pond. The sculptures, with their crinkled surfaces, blur the line between abstraction and figuration, solid mass and liquid. Like amalgams of the natural features around them, they simultaneously evoke knobby tree bark, fungus and rippling water.

The nearby water is a particularly important influence in Mr. Hunt’s work, he said. Having lived in Florida and Los Angeles, he said, “water has been near and dear to me most of my life.”