A labor of love yields a harmonious garden

More than 17 years ago, Carol DiFazio started a garden in Quogue. At that time, the back of the property, which overlooks Quantuck Bay, was a bog covered with a layer of muck that had been dredged from the bottom of the bay.

The Department of Environmental Conservation told the DiFazios that they had to remove the muck. They did, and filled in the back of the property with clean sand. Then Ms. DiFazio began to create her garden.

At first, the garden was a compact area behind the swimming pool with the bay beyond it. She said she wanted a natural look with plants that she’d seen growing wild around the area. Already present on the property were wild viburnum, clethra and orange daylilies. There were birch trees, too. Those were the first inhabitants of the garden.

Ms. DiFazio soon planted rugosa roses, too. Although they’re not native to Long Island, these intensely fragrant roses thrive all over the East End, in gardens and even at the beach.

The new gardener was after a wildflower sort of look, “like a seaside beach,” she explained. She said she didn’t want the kinds of classic English flower garden plants that she grows in her garden at her other home in Islip. “No phlox, no delphiniums, no hollyhocks,” she said firmly.

After a season or two, the garden began to grow, expanding on both ends. “I liked the way the lilies wove through the garden,” Ms. DiFazio said. So she planted more. Some yellow daylilies in front of the house were being consumed by the local deer population, so she and her husband, Frank, moved them to the new garden. Today there are at least half a dozen different daylily varieties in the garden.

The next big addition happened when the DiFazios got permission to fill in the steep drop-off next to their pool house. More sand was brought in to create a gentle slope on that side of the property, and the garden, now a long border across the back of the property, extended onto that newly-filled land.

Then they started moving hydrangeas from the front of the property back to the garden.

“Every weekend we dug up big things and moved them to the garden,” Ms. DiFazio said. “Of course,” she laughed, “we were younger 17 years ago.”

Flowers open in succession all season. Yellow flag and Siberian irises are followed by Japanese spiraea and daylilies, with loosestrife, butterfly bushes, sunflowers and mallows later in summer. There are several kinds of hydrangeas—classic blue macrophyllas, Annabelle with its huge white flower heads, and taller peegee types, with big, cone-shaped white flower clusters at their peak in late July. All the hydrangeas bloom for many weeks, the white ones aging slowly to pale pink and then deepening to rose.

And though the look of the garden is important, what the flowers attract is also something to be considered.

“The butterfly bushes are great,” Ms.. DiFazio said. “They really do well, and they attract lots of butterflies.”

She planted lots of black-eyed Susan, too, because they have the right kind of look for the garden, she explained. Plus, she said that she added other plants that just seemed to fit the natural landscape.

“I planted mallows because I saw them growing in the salt marshes around the area,” she said. “They make the garden look like Quogue should look.”

To add more color, she planted sunflowers and purple loosestrife, also known as lythrum. The loosestrife went into the garden long before it was known to be invasive; today it is carefully watched to make sure it does not spread beyond the garden.

A particular favorite perennial is helenium “Moerheim Beauty,” which bears masses of tawny-colored daisy-like flowers in midsummer.

To extend the blooming season into September, Ms. DiFazio plants dahlias each year. “Not the really big ones,” she said. “I like the single-flowered ones,” particularly those with dark purple foliage that contrasts with the green leaves of the other plants.

She plants zinnias, wax begonias and other small annuals along the front of the garden, too. Marigolds, alas, didn’t succeed—rabbits devoured them.

Wildlife has been an ongoing—and intensifying—problem. In the beginning, the garden was not fenced, though there were deer in the neighborhood.

“I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on sprays,” said Ms.. DiFazio. “We’d sit by the pool and it would smell like rotten eggs.”

The deer population has exploded in recent years, so the DiFazios put in high fencing to keep them out. They’re still around, just beyond the fence, in the phragmites grass that covers the space between the garden and the water, but they no longer invade the garden.

Rabbits, however, are still troublesome. This summer Ms. DiFazio said that she started sunflowers in pots on the deck “and the rabbits came up and ate every one.” So she started again, this time placing the pots high off the deck, and the plants are now out in the garden. “Hopefully in September I’ll have some big ones,” she said.

Today the DiFazios’ garden is 300 feet long—a breathtaking expanse of color and form, beautiful from spring to fall. It continues to evolve; new things are added, others removed, in an ongoing process of trial and error. And she has done it all herself.

Not all the plants thrive, of course. One failure was yellow echinacea. She planted a dozen or more of them, but not a single one came back the next year. She figured the soil was too wet for these coneflowers bred from plants native to prairies. Yellow butterfly bushes also didn’t make it.

A trim woman with a gardener’s tan, Ms. DiFazio is a self-taught gardener, the kind of person who just loves to be outdoors working among her plants, with her fingers in the dirt. She reads a lot of books on gardening, and loves to go on garden tours and explore gardens during the Garden Conservancy’s open days in spring.

But in the end, Ms. DiFazio has learned by doing. Her dazzling flower border is a testament to where passion and dedication can take a person.

Looking toward the future, she said, “I’d like the garden to be even bigger.”

Spoken like a true gardener.