FEATURES

BARBARA MACKLOWE'S OCEANSIDE GARDEN FLOURISHES IN THE SALTY SEA AIR

Usually dependent on blossoms, flowering gardens are not very captivating when their specialties are out of bloom. The ocean-side garden of Barbara Macklowe differs—it is as much about flourish and adventure as it is about flowers. As dynamic in growing her garden as she has been in cultivating The Macklowe Gallery on Madison Avenue with her husband Lloyd, Barbara has become as much of an expert in curating roses as she has Majorelle furniture, Gallé vases and other prized French Art Nouveau antiques. In both garden and gallery, she has exercised rarefied taste and an astonishingly passionate sense of color that reveals itself as much in lush pairings—unexpected salmon hibiscus with wild purple petunias, or a dragon's eye pine with a chartreuse smoke bush—as it does in the finest Tiffany lamp. Fronted by Georgica Pond to the north and the ocean to the south, Barbara's garden by the sea defies categorization and has been ingeniously planted to make the best of each summer moment.

Though the grand gesture may be roses, "rose garden" doesn't begin to describe the place. Roses relegated to a rose garden are one thing, usually static and definitive, but here they are everywhere—peaking above rooftops, clambering over walls, nestled between trees, invigorating shrubbery, hugging trellises. Nowhere is there a sense of "a rose bush." She applauds the new hybrids like 'Carefree' and 'New Dawn' for their tenacity and long bloom while treasuring the antique (and fleeting) 'Reine de Violette' as well as a wall massed with 'Veilchenblau'— an incredibly prolific climber that displays thousands of near-blue blooms in large, dense clusters.

The gradual, glorious climb to the dune level of the Macklowe home is an ecstatic exercise in garden connoisseurship, which extends to the turn-of-the-(last)-century American iron benches and urns that inform the eye at every turn.