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DESIGNER BETTY SHERRILL'S DAUGHTER REMINISCES ABOUT HER MOTHER'S FLOWER-FILLED LANDSCAPE IN SOUTHAMPTON

Being an interior designer, my mother Betty Sherrill is supposed to think about the inside of her house. But the outside is where her heart is. Not outside in the sense of mountains and rivers, or even walks on the beach. Just outside in her garden.

When she gets up in the morning in Southampton—spring, summer and fall (winters she spends in Hobe Sound, Fl.)—she puts on old-lady blue jeans and thin-soled sneakers that she neatened with white shoe polish the night before. Then she straps on her holster, which holds her clippers. My mother is by nature critical, and her favorite occupation, aside from thinking about her garden, is pruning, clipping and dead-heading. But she is also a dreamer. That's how her garden started, which she has always called her Secret Garden.

Like the thousands of daffodils my mother grows each year, her Secret Garden started in the dark. It was the spring of 1959, and we were in New York City. We were in her bedroom, lying in the middle of her bed, and all the shades were down. She had had breast cancer and was waiting to see what would come of it, and I had the measles. She had taken some time off from her job—one afternoon—and had taken it upon herself to entertain me by reading me a story, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden.

My mother's Secret Garden is located way up at the edge of our property, where Pond Lane curves around Lake Agawam. In August of the year I had measles, we moved into our house and the terrain in that area was tangled and overgrown. There was a strip of lawn leading down from it—it seemed like a steep hill—where some wild cherry trees were growing. My friend Joanie Meyer and I made an obstacle course out of it, a downhill slalom for our bicycles.