September 14, 2017--Arboreal Chic

I'm so glad we no longer have a house in East Hampton.

In case I was having any doubts about moving on when this formally bucolic place became a bastion of conspicuous consumption among big-bonus outer-borough Wall Streeters, a story in last week's New York Times cured me.

"How Does the Hamptons Garden Grow? With a Lot of Paid Help" is about vegetable gardening Hamptons' style.

The Times reports that compared to more familiar small scale, do-it-yourself vegetable gardens--

On the gilded acres of Long Island's East End, a different set of skill set often applies: hiring a landscape architect to design the garden, a gardener and crew to plant and pamper the beds, and sometimes even a chef to figure out what to do with the bushels of fresh produce. All that's left is to pick the vegetables--though employees frequently do that too.

Of course the "different set of skills" begins with the ability to write a big check.

Alec Gunn, a landscape gardener whose made-to-order gardens typically go for as much as $100,000 has something interesting to say about what is going on out there--

"What's driving the gardening bug [pun intended?] among the affluent, [professional] gardeners say, is their clients' focus on "self-care"--a curious phrase for a pursuit that requires so much help. . . [He adds], that the impulse includes a "moral component."  

"There's so much wealth, he said, "It's, 'Let's take something I've been fortunate to have [money] and put it back into the environment. I want to do something to reduce what I'm taking.'"

Rona and I knew it was time to begin to think about bailing out after participating in a garden tour for the benefit of the local Animal Rescue Fund. Among the gardens we visited was Martha Stewart's. She had recently bought a huge "cottage" by the ocean. 

We were stunned particularly by her mature rose garden. It was at least a half acre and included perhaps 50 varieties of roses. Talking with one of her gardeners we learned that it had been planted the week before.

"Just a week ago?" I nearly screamed at him. He just smiled as if to say, "If you have the money . . ."

A week or two later we were wandering around one of our favorite garden stores, Marders in Bridgehampton. They were well known for their stock of specimen trees. We stopped to look closely at one--a huge conifer. Not to buy it, it was listed at $5,000, but to admire its majesty.

We knew one of the owners and he walked over to say hello.  I said, "This is some tree."

He said, "If you promise not to tell anyone I have a story about it." We promised not to, though I am breaking that vow now. He told us that two, three years earlier Paul Simon, who had an estate on the beach in Montauk, wanted rows of them planted on both sides of the quarter-mile drive to his "cottage."

"We told him they wouldn't thrive there because they would be so close to the ocean that there would be too much salt in the air for trees of this kind. He insisted, and we said OK, but that we wouldn't guarantee them. He agreed and, though we shouldn't have, we agreed to plant them."

"What happened?" Rona asked.

"Within a year they were all dead."

"How much did they . . . ?"

"Hundreds of thousands," he confided in us. 

This was more than 15 years ago when hundreds of thousands was real money.

The Times article concluded--

The initial excitement of a vegetable garden fades for some clients. They lose interest, after they are planted. . . . It's the same thing with the chickens. They say, 'I have to have chickens, so I can tell my friends,' but they end up giving the eggs to the help.

Let me end with something on the same subject from my new-favorite book, Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy--

The Hamptons, where roadside vegetable stands sell Osaka purple mustard and Romanian wax peppers, developed a particular case of arboreal chic. Crimson king maples and golden honey locusts costing tens of thousands of dollars apiece became status symbols along with weeping copper beeches, according to one Baedeker. They had to look like they had been there since the first settlers:

Size, rarity, and the difficulty of transportation add to the cachet of some trees, but in the end it comes down to expense. Some trees now gracing Hamptons estates have been driven down from the Pacific Northwest in refrigerated tractor-trailers, and some have been planted with the aid of military-size Sikorsky helicopters to obviate the necessity of rutting the lawns with wheeled tracks. 

Amagansett Farmers Market

April 15, 2104--NY,NY: Stick-Figure Children

During our second day heading north on I-95, bored by the unchanging landscape and relentless traffic,  after running out of interest in making a list of out-of-state license plates (amazingly, we saw Alaska and Hawaii within 20 miles south of Richmond), we turned to anxieties about all the things that likely changed in Manhattan while we were snowbirding.

"I know you're worried that your Danon yogurt will cost $2.00."

"You bet I am," I confessed. "For me it's a litmus test for the cost of things more generally. Like how much maintenance we have to pay for our apartment and how much it will cost to park in our old garage. Probably $700 a month," I intentionally exaggerated.

"Forget how much they be charging for a double espresso at Balthazar."

"Remember," Rona reminded me, "we doing more eating at home and when we do go out for coffee we've been going to The Smile and . . ."

"Where my cortados will probably be $7.50."

"Can we change the subject?"

"Good idea," I said, cursing the car from Ontario that cut me off. "Those Canadian drivers," I sputtered. "They shouldn't let them in the country."

"It helps our balance of trade," Rona said, showing off that she has an MBA.

Reading my mind, she smiled. "While we're being driven off the road check out that bumper sticker."

I squinted into the glare. "What does it say? I can't read it."

"Our Children Are Not Stick-Figures."

"Huh?"

"That's what it says. Though I have no idea what it means."

"I think I know. I think . . ." I cut myself off. I'm trying to stop repeating everything.

"I'm totally puzzled."

"You remember those Baby On Board signs?"

"I do. Every car in suburbia seemed to have one."

"And remember how that morphed into things like Poodle On Board?"

"Or Mother-In-Law On Board."

"I remember you hated them. You can be such a curmudgeon."

"I cultivate my inner curmudgeon. It's one of the things that helps keep me centered when so much seems like it's spinning out of control or getting stupider."

"So what's with the stick-figure business?"

"Haven't you noticed that affixed to the rear windows of half the SUVs on the road . . .  I hate those too."

"SUVs?"

"For the life of me I can't understand the fetish about them. With gas creeping again toward $4.00 a gallon people are still buying them even though they get 15 miles to the gallon."

"I guess they make people feel safe."

"Maybe they're getting ready for the infrastructure to collapse and the oceans to rise."

"My, you make it so pleasant to drive 1,200 miles together."

"Sorry. I can be such a grump. But people put stick-figure decals on their SUV rear windows, one for each member of their families."

"What?"

"You heard me. Look, check it out, look at that SUV from Quebec that nearly drove us off the road. It has them." I pulled closer, tailgating, so we could take a closer look.

"I see," Rona said, "But be careful. I don't want us to get killed while looking at stick-figures. But, you're right, there appears to be a mommy stick-figure decal and a daddy and . . ."

"And it looks to me like a little girl, an adolescent boy, and . . ."

"And could that be a dog stick-figure?"

"They're members of the family too, aren't they? Dogs, I mean."

"I suppose so."

"To keep us from falling asleep in this traffic let's see if we can spot a two-daddy family."

"Or a family with a stick-figure anaconda. They're becoming more and more popular as pets." Rona was finally getting into it.

I made a face.

Finally, back in Manhattan, after unpacking and making a round of obligatory phone calls, we went through a week's worth of newspapers we had shlepped with us from Florida.

"Look at this," Rona said, all excited. She passed last Thursday's New York Times Style section to me. "More of the same."

"More of the same what?" I was still racing through Wednesday's paper.

"Like the stick-figure business."

"'Three-Seat Strollers'? That's the story you want me to read?"

"Yes, about how there's an increasing number of affluent families with three children."

"So?"

"So according to the article, on the Upper East Side in the year 2000, 49 percent of the richest families had two or more children but now the percentage is up to 59 percent, with a decided edge to three children."

"And, what's the big deal?"

"Some are claiming, if you'd read this, that the third child is a 'status child.'"

"I'm not following this."

"With two kids you might be able to get away with a two-bedroom apartment; but with three you need at least three. This shows you have the money to buy a place that size. You know what a fortune it is. Especially Downtown and on the East Side."

"You mean it's no longer enough to have a second home in the Hamptons?"

"Everyone has a house out there."

"Or a Range Rover?"

"Ditto. Two or three from New York nearly ran over you an hour ago when you were dawdling in the passing lane."

"I was going 80."

"What can I tell you, they wanted to go 90."

"So now when we go to the Met or Modern uptown we'll get run off the sidewalk by a three-seat stroller?"

"Now you're getting the picture."

"Do you think my yogurt will really be $2.00?"