Three-Season Gardens

For many of us, summer is the season we think of when we imagine a garden rich with color. But for Bruce Feller, the rest of the year is when the garden shines most brightly.

On Sunday afternoon, in 50-degree weather that felt more like spring than the middle of winter, members of the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons gathered at the Bridgehampton Community Center to hear Mr. Feller share his insights on how he achieves three seasons of color—fall, winter and spring—in his 2-acre garden.

When Mr. Feller retired from business in 1998, he and his wife, Marianne, began work on the landscape around their home in Old Field on the North Shore. Their 24-years-and-counting labor of love has taken on the dimensions of a full-time job. Over the years they have designed and maintained their landscape to provide, as they describe it, “a tapestry of color, texture and form.”

The Garden’s Focus

The Feller garden is built primarily on three groups of plants: Japanese maples, conifers and rhododendrons. By fortunate happenstance, their property is ideally suited for gardening, Mr. Feller explained. It’s on a north-facing slop overlooking sheltered Conscience Bay, with acidic, sandy soil.

The land is populated with tall, old, locust trees that cast a light, dappled shade. There are also towering oaks that let in plenty of light beneath their high branches. The maples, conifers and rhododendrons get enough sun to thrive, but not so much that they burn.

When creating a garden, Mr. Feller said, don’t forget the view from inside the house, particularly from that window over the kitchen sink where one inevitably spends a lot of time.

“Now is a good time of year to do that,” he said of looking at and planning for that area. “When the trees are bare and it’s easier to see the structure of the landscape.”

The Glory Of Autumn

Mr. Feller began his garden journey with fall, when the Japanese maples are in their full, glorious foliage color. Handsome plants in any season with their graceful forms and delicately serrated leaves, the brilliant reds, oranges and yellows of the maples’ autumn foliage set the Feller garden ablaze.

In his garden, maples mix with conifers and rhododendrons in groupings. One widely planted Japanese maple, Bloodgood, offers rich, red fall color, Mr. Feller reported, adding that it needs space around it. The tree’s aggressive root system, he explained, makes it a poor choice for interplanting in a grouping, though set in an expanse of lawn it can be quite beautiful, he said.

A favorite of Mr. Feller for orange fall color is the Japanese maple variety of Red Pygmy,

acer palmatum

. For outstanding yellow, he favors a coralbark maple, Sango-Kaku.

As the name implies, the coralbark Japanese maples are known for their red bark. This variety has chartreuse leaves that hold their yellow-green color through spring and summer until they turn bright yellow in fall, when the red bark begins to deepen in color. That yellow foliage lights up shady spots, Mr. Feller said, an effect that some gardeners like and others do not.

The

dissectum

group of Japanese maples, which have lace-like leaves and a drooping habit, are loved for their finely divided leaves, he said. These trees, he added naturally assume an interesting form.

Winter Is For Conifers

When the maples drop their leaves, the evergreens come into their own. Mr. Feller belongs to the American Conifer Society and along with his son, Colby, created a display garden of dwarf conifers on the Arsenal rooftop in Central Park.

“Conifers,” he said, “will give you needle color through the year.”

Generally conifers appreciate sun, Mr. Feller reported. Though his do fine under the high locusts and oaks on his property, he said.

In winter, conifers are standouts for their forms and the variety of their coloration. In addition to many shades of green, needled evergreens may be golden, silvery or blue. And, most conifers carry snow beautifully, according to Mr. Feller.

“Remember what snow is?” he said with a smile and nod to the warm temperatures outdoors.

The conifer enthusiast went on to explain that when the horizontal space in his garden began to fill up, he went vertical—planting narrow, columnar (fastigiate, in horticulture-speak) conifers that punctuate the landscape. He is, he said, “a big fan of narrow elements in the garden.”

One particularly useful group of cultivars for Long Island are the varieties derived from the Nootka false cypress,

chamaecyparis nootkatensis

. Deer don’t eat them in Mr. Feller’s garden, he said, and the foliage doesn’t burn (turn brown) in winter as some other evergreens do. He remarked that Hurricane Sandy turned many conifers, such as white pines, across Long Island a rusty shade of brown. We don’t yet know whether they will recover in spring or be irreparably damaged.

Rhododendrons Rule In Spring

A particular passion in the Feller garden is the universe of rhododendrons. Both of the Fellers are active members of the American Rhododendron Society, and both were awarded the association’s Bronze Medal in 2009 for their work in educating the public about the genus Rhododendron. Mr. Feller is currently the Eastern Vice President of the ARS, and has served as president of the New York chapter.

For Mr. Feller, rhododendrons saturate the garden with color when they bloom, and are the “main draw” for him. He believes they, especially the small-leaved varieties (called “lepidotes”), don’t get the attention they deserve.

Rhododendrons, he pointed out, bloom early and offer a pleasing range of colors. Ambrose Light is a lovely soft pink. It and the yellow-flowered Amber Lantern bloom at the same time, along with forsythias. Mr. Feller said that he also loves blue-flowered rhododendrons such as Blaney’s Blue, which he described as a well-behaved plant and a good choice for Long Island gardens.

The most widely grown rhododendron of them all is the ubiquitous

roseum elegans,

a tall-growing large-leaved type with big clusters of purple-pink flowers. A 12-foot-high specimen in the Feller garden collapsed under its own weight last year. But, Mr. Feller said, the branches resting on the ground began to root, so now the tall plant has become a low colony. It’s another example of the garden’s evolution.

Gardeners interested in seeing the Feller garden in Old Field can visit it on May 11, from noon to 4 p.m., as part of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program. Visit gardenconservancy.org for more information.