THE GARDEN PICNICS

The Garden Picnics are afternoons in July in private gardens on the East End of Long Island, one garden each week and never the same twice, for twenty members. The owner walks the party through the planting before anyone eats; then lunch is laid on the lawn, with the hampers, the linen and the staff from the Court.

It exists because the great gardens of the East End are private, and are best seen with the person who made them.

The Picnic

The word began in seventeenth-century France as pique-nique, a meal to which every guest brought or paid a share, and had nothing to do with the open air. It reached English in the 1740s and meant an outdoor meal only in the early nineteenth century; in 1802 more than two hundred fashionable Londoners formed the Pic Nic Society, each bringing a part of the food and the entertainment, with no host. The grander thing was French: the fête champêtre, the party in the fields, with whole orchestras hidden in the trees, which Watteau painted from about 1710.

The East End is a country of gardens. At Madoo, in Sagaponack, the painter Robert Dash made two acres from 1967; the name, he said, is Old Scots for “my dove”. At LongHouse, in East Hampton, the textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen set sixteen acres of planting and sculpture round a house modelled on the shrine at Ise. Grey Gardens, before the Beales let it go to ruin, was Anna Gilman Hill’s walled garden; “the soft gray of the dunes, cement walls, and sea mists,” she wrote, “gave us our color scheme as well as our name.” Since 1995 the Garden Conservancy has opened private gardens to visitors a few days a year.

The Afternoon

Twenty places, in a different garden each week.

The party arrives at noon and the owner, or the gardener, walks it through the garden for an hour before lunch.

Lunch is laid on the lawn or under the trees: hampers, linen, glass and staff, all brought by the Court, and nothing left behind.

The afternoon ends at four.

What Is Asked

A lounge suit, or a linen one; summer dresses. Flat shoes for the walk.

Nothing is picked, and nobody leaves the paths unless the owner does.

Photographs only with the owner’s leave.

The garden’s address is not passed on.

The Places

Twenty. It is as many as a garden will take without being trampled.

Members are written to in May, and told the garden a week before.

The sum is stated in the invitation and covers lunch and the Court’s arrangements; the owner is thanked with a gift to a garden charity of their choosing.

The Court’s Beach House is in Southampton through the same weeks.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.