Notes from Madoo: Making a Garden in the Hamptons

Extracted from the author's gardening columns in the East Hampton Star, these short, exuberant essays tell of 1.98 acres on the far eastern end of Long Island, where Dash has made a garden he calls Madoo, ""My Dove"" in an old Scots dialect. Dash is a painter, and it shows in every line as he takes readers through a year in a garden characterized by ""continuous involvement with the patterns of abstract expressionism."" There are descriptions of his favorite plants, bits of garden history, some gardening advice (suited mainly to his area of Long Island) and, in pieces on garden fairies and the tribulations of Adam and Eve in Eden, a few amazing flights of fancy. Opinionated and eccentric, Dash doesn't mince words about his dislikes--the loss of a neighboring field to a housing development, weather forecasters, forsythia (""an absolute ass of a color"")--and he freely admits that the hues of his garden's fences would ""make indoor eyeballs wince."" Dash's lush prose is best taken in small doses, like an over-rich dessert, but he has a gift for evoking what he sees, as when he speaks of wild daisies ""making marvelous stops and explosions throughout the garden and in the fields."" His observations about the after-colors of winter's withered perennials, the ""smell of nameless turnings in the woods"" and the taste of a good lettuce, ""like dew,"" should refresh any garden reader. (June) FYI: Since 1994, Madoo has been an independent charitable trust, the Madoo Conservancy.