The Secret Garden Tour

June 5, 2021 @ 2:00PM — 6:00PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Attend the first ever public tour of the Shelter Island garden of James Marshall and Adam Bundy.

The Secret Garden Tour image

There are currently no tickets available for this event, but you can still make a donation.

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Guests will delve into the philosophy behind the one acre garden near Coecles Harbor with its over five thousand plants—some in bloom every month of the year. A series of garden rooms take visitors on an extended journey making a full circle around the property, an ongoing experiment where ornamental and native, formal and wild are asked to harmonize through the seasonal drama of light, sound and scent:

"The concept of the 'garden' came from a spiritual need not a desire. Of making a long-term commitment to watching a living, organic creation evolve and transform. Of designing an experiment and an experience for generations into the future. Of building questions and planning discoveries into a living framework. Designing a garden that makes one stop and observe, stop and listen, stop and smell—stop and learn in a deeper and older way than modern life typically allows. To reconnect with being human, but human as just one organism in nature’s stunning tableau, no more or less important than the rest. The joy of studying nature is that there is always a discovery to be made, whether scientific or spiritual, and its often a mirror reflecting back on your deepest self. If you let them, gardens teach you wabi-sabi—to embrace and accept imperfection, impermanence, not to fear death or decay, but to embrace life’s cycles. There is a lesson and beauty in weathering, in rust, in patina, in a dying branch, in the need for lichen, moss and mushrooms. Gardens have souls—indulge your curiosity. That’s the gift of aging with your garden. It’s never too soon or too late to start. Gardens are a place to practice patience and deepen perspective: That the cycling of life and death is the beauty of the natural world, that some plants will thrive and some will decline, each in their own time. That all things have their place—some are part of the overstory, some the understory—serving different roles but all infinitely related. That the natural world of plants is networked (literally, through fungi underground), connected and constantly communicating. That—after a year in the human world where connection feels shattered and lost—the collective memory of a garden has so much to teach us, to remind us of things known but long forgotten." ~James Marshall


As featured in Newsday on April 4, 2021: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsday.com/amp/l...

Social Distancing will be maintained. Masks Required. Please, no pets allowed.