A Long Island Garden with a Pagoda Chicken Coop and Salvaged Greenho #GardenTour #LongIslandGarden

Well this is my patio and this is where we have lots of other intimate dinner parties. We have lots of dinner parties here at this house and we have other places on the property, we have dinner parties in other kitchens as well. So here I have a little bit of palacio majolica and also this is more of that set of dishes that Jonathan and I made for a show not too long ago. Again that tropical theme and again we're near the near the water and if you look carefully almost everything is about the ocean here. We had a problem with this part of the house. Our watering system, we didn't have drip irrigation on everything and so we decided we would be the lazy gardeners that we can be. We actually did all succulents and cactus up here on this part of the garden and these are all things that need very little water. We do have a couple of espaliated apple trees or I mean what they call columnar apple trees here too and we actually have those on drip so that they actually don't get neglected for water. But this was a way to start a new collection and we I think it works really beautifully to have all these succulents as part of the garden out here. This clematis is really doing something special for us today. I didn't expect it to be so in bloom. It's really beautiful. When we moved here this is where there was actually a huge garage right where we're standing in the middle of this fountain and Jonathan and I rented a backhoe and we dug out the fountain ourselves and we laid all the cinder blocks and we made this fountain. Come on let's go to the greenhouse. This is our greenhouse. This is a Lord and Burnham greenhouse. It actually came from a famed Whitney estate and a friend of ours gave us a phone call and said they're going to decommission three of the greenhouses. You can have one as long as you provide us some insurance and I jumped at the thought of it and we ended up putting this in our van one little piece at a time. It was 60 by 100 when we got it and we actually made it much smaller so it would be something we could manage and Jonathan and I rebuilt it here on the property about seven years ago and so this is something we always dreamed of having and we have it. Again it was 60 by 100. It's now about 20 by 25 and it's a size that we can actually manage ourselves and pay for all the heat during the winter but one of the most magical things about this is in the winter time when actually it's snowing and it's just awful out we'll come out here we have the heat up to about 75 degrees and we're in Florida. Actually most of the tropicals that are in the yard come back into here. This is it in its most empty state right now and it actually is just summering over with fewer plants right now. It's much more dramatic in the winter. Next I'm going to take you to our Asian garden. We call it an Asian garden because it's not really Japanese and it's not Chinese it's just blank Asia. This is actually where our chickens live. Our chickens are no more though because they passed away during COVID. They were in their 20s. They live to be about 20 to 25 years old and ours got about 21. We think that's about their age. We're now in the Asian garden and as I said before the Asian garden is a loose fitting term because it's neither Chinese nor Japanese. It's our interpretation of an Asian garden. This is actually the oldest tree on the property. We think it was built it was actually placed here at the time the property was built in 1910. It's actually a boulevard cypress and there's actually a botanical name on there which I won't bore you with. As I said before this is where we a house we built for our chickens and chickens are actually Asian animals. We didn't know that until we did a little research and it turns out they were actually originated from the far east and so we had to build them a pagoda to live in and we try and do things sort of according to Asian gardens here. You see this tree has been made into what they call clouds and we trim this every year in order to be able to make it look the way it does. It's high maintenance but it's very pretty I think. If you look at the pagoda we actually went to Chinatown and we actually found this is a moon gate window and we we made this and then we made it into a Dutch door so it opens like this. Well this is our white garden and as most people know Sissinghurst was the home of the first white garden and this is Kippen Hill's little miniaturized version of a white garden. If you see we have lots of Annabelle hydrangeas and we have white tipped hostas. Everything in this garden is white including these wisteria that actually bloom in the springtime. Everything has a bit of a season here. There's some lilies here that are just about ready to bloom. They didn't give decide to give their show yet and these are all white lilacs that are actually are past bloom now. This is one of our perennial beds and we love roses. Jonathan absolutely adores roses and these are simple knockout roses but we found them to be the most floriferous and the most reliable rose that we can actually find. They are coming out with new varieties all the time. This yellow yarrow is a good performer for us. We've just finished up with elliums. We had some really wonderful ellium displays out here. You can still see some of the seed heads which I think are really remarkable. I love these seed heads. I don't take them off until well after they're done blooming because they're so pretty. I love the structure of them but when they're actually in full bloom they're these giant globes of purple. So what do I like best about the house? Well you know what it's a really comfortable house to entertain in. I love to have people around much more than my husband here. He could be a loner forever but me I have to have people. I just am a magnet. I have to have people and so much to his chagrin we have people over all the time and I just love when we have people that are willing to spend the weekend with us, stay the night, we get to cook together, we get to laugh and joke, maybe build a fire. It just makes me feel like that's the whole purpose of our home. This is a place that I share with the world. I actually am the president of a garden club and we have 30 ladies and some gentlemen who actually come regularly to this house and they see it as almost a place that's theirs too and that's how I like to have them think about it. So I love this house because we get to entertain in so many different ways. And you get to decorate. Yeah we get to decorate a lot of rooms. We actually own the house next door to which we made into our guest house and that house between this house and that house we have 10 bedrooms and between this house I think it's like 34 rooms that we've gotten to decorate. You counted chairs one time. How many chairs do we have? I have a hundred. I feel like I'm confessing a sin. I have 144 chairs in this house. There's plenty of places to sit down. Yes and I collect chairs. I'm an auctioneer's dream. They have a single chair and my hand and my paddle goes up and I have to have one. Thanks for watching. For more homeworthy content be sure to like and subscribe.