Westhampton Garden Club 'Gardens & Rooms Tour' Is July 12

The Westhampton Garden Club is taking a new tack with its biennial tour this year, introducing the Gardens & Rooms Tour on Friday, July 12.

Westhampton Garden Club tours have been a beloved tradition in the greater Westhampton area since 1950, if not earlier, showcasing spectacular houses and the beautiful gardens around them. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tour’s emphasis has shifted to the gardens, and the 2024 event will include a peek inside the houses, highlighting a special room at each stop.

The stops on the tour are kept a surprise. Ticket-holders don’t learn the addresses of the gardens until the day of the event when they are given a map, and the names of the homeowners are never revealed — with one exception this year. In another break from tradition, 2024 tour co-chair Dorothy Hom has let it be known that her and her husband’s Westhampton Beach garden is one of the stops.

Hom is brave to both run the tour and have her garden be on the tour in the same year, said Westhampton Garden Club President Melissa Morgan Nelson as Hom gave a preview of her garden to a reporter this spring.

Hom met Nelson in 2019, when Hom joined the Westhampton Garden Club after becoming a full-time local resident.

“My husband, Michael Strauss, he is a rosarian, and we have had a summer home here in Westhampton Beach since 2000, but moved out here permanently in 2018,” Hom said.

There was an older contemporary house on their property, and they tore it down to build a very traditional home that they call their “English cottage.” And the new home needed a new garden.

“I said, ‘Well, you love roses, so why don’t you go to town and put up something to keep the deer away and go hog wild on your roses,’” Home recalled. “And my husband being my husband … he doesn’t do things modestly. He goes full out.”

They now have 300 rose bushes, and beehives to boot.

“It’s a tremendous amount of care and a tremendous reward,” Hom said.

She said they joined the garden club because they want to share — and she’s met the nicest people since becoming a member. She first became involved in the tour through the 2022 tour journal, writing the blurbs about the featured gardens based on her interviews with the homeowners.

Everyone appreciates looking behind the hedges and seeing something beautiful, she said. “What we tried to do with the stories is to give them a why: How did this come to be?”

In interviewing each homeowner, she explored what unique pleasure the garden and the home provide. “What does it bestow upon the homeowner that you on this special day in a summer are invited to share and partake of?”

She noted a tree in her garden that she describes as her and her husband’s story: “That is a hybrid maple. And it’s an unusual tree because half the tree has red leaves, and the other half has green leaves.”

She said her husband is German Jewish and she’s Chinese American. “It’s like our marriage,” she said. “You know, it’s a nice hybrid.”

The garden also features hollies, cedars and other evergreen shrubs and trees.

“But what we specialize in are the roses,” Hom said.

Members of the garden club are already familiar with the Hom-Strauss garden, or at least how it looks in June. She invites the garden club on the second Friday each June to see the first-flush roses in bloom.

“Many first-flush roses repeat, some do not. So it’s that first wonderful explosion of color,” she says.

In planning the garden, much thought was given to where the repeat bloomers would be located versus the one-offs.

“The garden is different in July and as pleasurable in just a whole other different way,” Hom said.

Hom calls the rooms on the tour “feature attractions.”

One Quogue property has a cocktail pavilion.

“There’s a gorgeous pool, and centered on it is a cocktail pavilion,” Hom said. “And you step inside, and you’re in like Marrakech or Sicily, and you’re in a kitted out room with a gas-fired fireplace, and you desperately want to drink. And you’re outdoors, and then behind that is a mancave — a room with big leather sofas and a TV.”

One home’s feature is a powder room that was formerly a telephone room. Other “rooms” include a pool house and “she shed.”

“And my home, people are going to be welcome up on the deck, and they are welcome to glimpse in,” Hom said. “So there are opportunities to see how people live.”

Hom and Strauss’s home will also be the one stop on the tour that offers refreshments. Lawn chairs will be out for tourgoers to rest and enjoy the property, and she will invite them to linger.

“This is a particular property that you have to kind of circle your way through,” she said. “There is no one route.”

A Remsenburg couple who are putting their garden on the tour also visited Hom’s garden on the day Hom gave a preview. Their identities are being kept confidential, in accordance with the tradition, but they shared some details about what makes their garden special.

They said they are honored to be included. They have been in their home for three years. It’s on a full acre, fully landscaped, with steel modern sculptures at the pool, which is enclosed with boxwoods.

The prior owners had been true lovers of gardening, with over 200 varieties of plants, they reported.

“Properties like that are really meant to be enjoyed by others,” they said.

“Gardens give joy,” Hom added. “… Gardens are universally moments of joy and positivity, and they nurture. It’s about keeping an abundance of living things green and blooming and healthy.”

There will be five gardens on the tour in all, including a circa 1790 Greek Revival in Remsenburg and a landmarked 1903 Quogue residence and garden. The tour is self guided, with docents at each stop.

Proceeds from each tour support the club’s public educational gardens as well as scholarships and free programs. Westhampton Garden Club teams maintain two gardens at the Quogue Library — a historical garden and a pollinator garden — the native lily pond garden in Quogue and the Garden of Remembrance at the Quogue Firehouse. The club designed, oversees and funds maintenance, through Dragonfly Landscaping, of An English Garden by the Sea at the Westhampton Beach Village Green. The club is also planning gardens in partnership with the Westhampton Historical Society.

Among the club’s other activities are distributing topiaries each December to East End Hospice patients, providing seasonal plantings at the Kanas Center for Hospice Care and practicing advocacy through its conservation committee.

Tickets to the Westhampton Garden Club Gardens & Rooms Tour on Friday, July 12, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. start at $85. Order at westhamptongardenclub.org. Tickets can also be purchased at the Quogue Library on the day of the tour. For help with ordering, email Melissa at fiberfox2004@yahoo.com and provide a phone number.