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Prodigiously gifted, mischievously wry, and periodically misanthropic, Robert Dash was a modern-day Renaissance man. Born in Brooklyn in 1931, he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School and then headed west to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he studied anthropology and edited a poetry journal. A talented poet in his own right, he also played classical piano and taught himself to paint, dabbling in Abstract Expressionism (ultimately he was more of a realist) and eventually landing solo shows at prominent New York City galleries, including Barone, when he was just 30.
A whimsical lilac-colored stile offers views of the Quincunx Gardens and the Long Border.
Tria GiovanEven though he was a native New Yorker, Dash eschewed the Big Apple, preferring instead the country charms of the Hamptons on Long Island, where artists and poets including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Fairfield Porter, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and more were lured by big skies, broad beaches, and (at the time) reasonably affordable rents. In 1965, he spied an abandoned Sagaponack farm field from the window of a Realtor’s car and bought the two-acre parcel on the spot. “It winked at me,” he once wrote about the land, which became his in 1967.
Madoo’s new Welcome Center, built on the site of a dilapidated shed, incorporates mirrors that reflect the Asian Pond Garden.
Dash transformed an extant circa-1740 structure (the former barn of a Colonial home now owned by photographer Jill Krementz, the writer Kurt Vonnegut’s widow) into a rustic residence and painting studio and over the years affixed a series of sheds and workers’ shacks to it in order to create an elaborate J shape with a central courtyard, likely influenced by adobe architecture he had seen in New Mexico. This he deemed the Summer House, as it had subpar heating and was habitable only in warmer weather. A section of the barn that dated from 1850 was detached completely, relocated to another part of the property, and christened the Winter House. Dash would move from one to the other twice yearly, typically when the cold ocean gales started blowing in October and the first daffodils poked through the ground in April.
Purple loosestrife, asparagus, and Joe Pye weed grow in profusion at the edge of Madoo’s potager.
TIMOTHY HESLOP.
Underscored by a swath of white loosestrife, the Purple Gazebo offers a respite adjacent to the quirkily plotted Ginkgo Grove.
Tria Giovan
A Swedish-blue wheel-away bench provides vibrant contrast to a handkerchief tree and a Japanese maple in the Long Border.
Tria GiovanThe ultimate autodidact, Dash simultaneously undertook building a garden, knowing little more than what he had learned tending a patch of vegetables while summering as a teenager at his family’s weekend home in Tuxedo Park. As the soil evolved from fallow to fertile, the experiments started in earnest, first with standard evergreen plant material and later with comparative exotica, such as a Franklinia (an American native saved from extinction by 18th-century British horticulturist John Bartram), a grove of fastigiate ginkgo trees, a yew maze studded with mulberry trees, a French-inflected potager, and a Davidia involucrata, commonly known as the handkerchief or dove tree, so named for its fluttery white bracts. The garden, which Dash called “Madoo”—a transliteration of the old Scots phrase for “my dear” or “my dove”—was beginning to emerge.
Painted electric blue and planted with apricot-hued ‘Crown Princess Margareta’ climbing roses, a pair of caisses de Versailles planters flank the entry to the Summer House studio, originally Dash’s painting atelier and now a reception and exhibition space.
Kendell Cronstrom
On the Sunken Terrace, masses of Tractor Seat plant (Farfugium japonicum) spring from a custom trellis-edged container donated to Madoo by decorator Charlotte Moss.
Tria GiovanRoses of all sizes and colors soon perfumed the air, alongside magnolias, a rare weeping English oak, beds of herbaceous spring bulbs, and a laburnum arbor that was an homage to the great British gardener Rosemary Verey. Dash also played with the hardscaping, creating paths made with disks sawn from telephone poles, building a pagoda-topped bridge across a small pond, and painting structures—an arch above an entry pathway, a viewing stile, freestanding bits of trelliswork—in vibrant colors, transforming the quotidian to the sublime.
A rare weeping English oak thrives above the Summer Lawn and adjacent farm fields. Dash planted the tree as a foot-tall sapling in 2012, a year before he died.
Kendell CronstromIn 1994, lacking heirs or close family, Dash had the presence of mind to establish Madoo as a nonprofit, which included lifetime tenancy (he died in 2013) and stipulated that the garden would be open to the public for generations to come. But Madoo, he later told its director, Alejandro Saralegui (my life partner and co-author of the book Madoo: The Making of an American Garden), should not be “preserved in amber.” Never too precious or impractical, Dash knew that Madoo had to evolve in order to survive, something that is likely key to why many have described the garden as his defining masterpiece.
Based on an ancient Indo-Persian design, the Rill narrows from one end to the other, making the water feature appear longer than it actually is. It is flanked by weeping Kousa dogwoods, potted rosebushes, and a post-bloom miniature bulb meadow.
Tria GiovanTHIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 21 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!
