Seibert & Rice

April Gonzalez is a landscape designer in Southampton, New York. She writes a weekly article, “Eartly Delights,” for the Southampton Press, and hosts a weekly radio show, “Notes From the Garden” on WLIU.
Bob Dash found a combination of perfect light and perfect soil in Sagaponack, New York about 40 years ago. He fell in love with a barn on land adjacent to a farm and settled in without running water or electricity. The silence was delicious. “It was marvelous,” he recalled of the absence of sound.

But nothing was as intoxicating as the scintillating light that has entranced artists on the East End for centuries. “It is a double light,” he told me one beautiful, sunny day at the entrance to Madoo Conservancy, his garden love of over four decades. “It is marine light and skylight multiplied by reflections from all the streams, rivers and ponds; bouncing pulsing light. Some people call it Dutch light, but to me it is Venetian. You cannot fix it in time or place, it is mysterious and mischievous. But above all it is aqueous. It has an effect on me emotionally. It is this sort of wobbly light; all forms are constantly slipping and changing. Constantly forming and reforming. Near becomes far, and far becomes near.”

In the beginning Dash was surrounded by farms. One of his favorite things to do was to go down to the milk house where they made cheese. “I had a little stove and I would make burgers. One farmer let me pick tomatoes and the other let me pick blueberries. I was really happy.” He has his own banks of blueberries now and is experimenting this year with Syrian tomatoes, anticipating the fabled 5 lb butternut squash-like fruits with the type of hope, humor and skepticism that only a gardener can blend, season after season, like pigment on a palette.

Through the years he has painted and printed colorfully accurate renditions of the fields in bloom. His artistic bent, somewhat distanced from his education in ethnology and English, may have stemmed from his childhood interest in livening things up. Like the expensive antique wall paper in his family's home, a print of English pastoral landscapes, that was crying out for embellishment in young Bobby's eyes. “I sat under the credenza with my box of crayolas and colored them in. It created a terrible scene when I was found out. I wanted to brighten it up; I still like to brighten things up”.

We see this in his giant flower phase where poppies fill the canvas. Now he is mostly sketching – pencil drawings of textures and forms that, to my eye, seem abstracted from all the foliage, vistas, cloud banks and garden beds around him.

“Art should always be new, as I think gardens should always be new. Gardens can get stale just like living rooms can go stale”. Right now Dash is doing “a lot of transplanting to revivify areas in Madoo”. He clarified his relationship to the natural world: “I like to make things, green things are extremely natural, but gardening is... you have to be a conductor. Every single member of your garden is an unruly performer who wants to be a soloist. All plants are monsters and you have to get them in order”.

This may, in part, be due to the famous Bridgehampton loam. Plants that survive in this rich heavy soil thrive with a tropical-like vitality. Over the years Dash's ideas of what should be in the garden have changed. “I hated variegated foliage, now I love it. I hated vines on stationary plants, now I love them. I used to think I could not live without snapdragons, but I don't plant them any more.”

Considered one the ten greatest American gardens, Dash's master oeuvre may be Madoo. His love of light, soil, plants and pruning is on view twice a week. And he is usually at the gate, sketching in the shade while waiting to greet who ever walks through.

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