It makes perfect sense that Barefoot Contessa cookbook author Ina Garten hired the granddaughter of a garden club flower judge to design a sprawling, blowsy kitchen garden for her home in East Hampton.
Garden designer Edwina von Gal, best known for restoring to-the-manor-born charm to the Grey Gardens estate formerly owned by Big Edie and Little Edie Beale (the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis), has an innate understanding of how to create the garden equivalent of Garten's luxe version of comfort food. The great-niece of Diana Vreeland and the great-granddaughter of a railroad magnate, von Gal grew up experimenting in both garden and kitchen. The first recipe she learned to cook was, fittingly, hollandaise sauce.
Von Gal started designing fanciful gardens in the Hamptons 30 years ago, where she delighted in undercutting the fussy formality of the summer crowd's vernacular with native plants and drifts of wildflowers. In Ina Garten's original quarter-acre kitchen garden in East Hampton, the clipped parterres were a backdrop to edibles and ornamentals encouraged to go wild. (No longer a garden designer, von Gal in 2013 founded the Long Island-based Perfect Earth Project, which promotes toxin-free gardens.)
Eight years ago, Garten purchased an adjoining property in East Hampton, on which she built a "cook's barn" (designed by architect Frank Greenwald) where she tapes her Food Network show, a dining terrace, and a walled garden. Let's take a look around:
Above: Photograph via Oprah.
For years, Garten wrote yearly notes offering to buy a neighbor's property. Finally, he said yes.
Above: Photograph via Wall Street Journal.
On the adjoining property, Garten built a barn and a walled kitchen garden (take that, deer) where edibles and ornamentals keep company companionably.
Above: Photograph via Wall Street Journal.
An exuberant climbing rose serves as a backdrop in the kitchen garden.
Above: Photograph via Wall Street Journal.
Garten grows chart, cherry tomatoes, olives, herbs, and fennel. One thing she does not grow is cilantro: she hates the taste.
Above: Photograph via Wall Street Journal.
Swiss chard ready to be harvested.
Above: Photograph via House Beautiful.
A shady spot with a view of the garden. Garten's garden has several seating areas because, she says, a garden isn't meant to be seen from the house. It's meant to be lived in.
Above: Photograph via Frank Greenwald Architect.
Garten says she is not a big proponent of eating outdoors because "nature competes with dinner." She prefers cocktail hour on the terrace and dinner indoors.
Above: Photograph via Clara Persis.
Hydrangeas (L) and drifts of lavender (R). "I live to walk outside with clippers and cut whatever's there," says Garten, who owns six pairs of Felco pruners.
For more of our favorite cooks' gardens, see:
- At Home with Cookbook Author Mollie Katzen in Berkeley
- Garden Visit: 66 Square Feet (Plus) on a Harlem Terrace
- Garden Visit: A Cook's Garden in Upstate New York
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