Marshouse - Garden of Edwina von Gal

About

My garden is named Marshouse (pronounced Marsh House) because my house is literally in a salt marsh, on stilts. I love the marsh because I am not allowed to touch it. The other, upland side, is where I garden. The garden is a series of ecosystems, with a meadow at either end, which I have been working on since I moved here in 2003. It was spring 2021 when I finally put deer fencing around about half of it, and now, I am going wild filling it with all the flowering native plants that the deer have eaten out of all our Hamptons wild places. It is very much a work in process, but it always will be. It is my place to experiment; to test ideas about growing native plants, creating habitat, and managing biomass before I try them on my clients, or recommend them to others. This is where I meet my own commitment to the initiative we recently launched: www.234birds.org. This makes for a lot going on. The four-plus acres contain a variety of gardens in various stages of progress: meadows, meadow-like borders, a woodland, and a moss garden. I do not remove any biomass from the property, so I have explored ingenious ways to use it: log walls from invasive trees, Hügelkultur piles, hay stacks of the meadow cuttings, plus lots of composting. After all of that, you can, like me, relax with a visit to the marsh over a small boardwalk that leads out to Accabonac Harbor through a magical hummock.

This garden's estimated size is 5 acres.

2025 Open Day: Saturday, September 13

Hours: 10-4