Hudson Valley Magazine
A Purposeful Confusion
In Duncan Brine’s big, beautiful garden, it’s hard to tell the difference between nature and nurture.
by Lynn Hazlewood
When Duncan Brine talks about his garden in Pawling, Dutchess County, he often uses the words “mystery,” “surprise” and “drama.” And if you stroll around the grounds that he has cultivated over the past 17 years, it’s clear that it was those notions, rather than the usual horticultural esthetics, that were the driving force behind its design. The place is by turns mysterious and surprising, with a dash of drama for good measure.Brine, who grew up in Rye in Westchester and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, began his career in the theater, intending to be a director. A stint in Los Angeles doing film production work was “a pause along the way,” he says. What turned out to be the prelude to a much more lasting pause came in the early 80s, when Brine met Julia, a botanical artist who is now his wife.
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Julia lived in a floor-through Brooklyn apartment with a little patch of ground behind it.
“It was a semi-junkyard back there,” Brine remembers. He decided to transform the junkyard into a garden in order to film it - and that first encounter with horticulture evolved into his life’s work as a landscape designer.
“I sifted the soil, needlessly,” Brine says, recalling his first efforts. “What did I know? I followed my instincts. I planted a lot of things by seed, something I don’t bother to do now. One of the predominant plants was the amaranth, Love-lies-bleeding.” (That variety of amaranth - a five-foot-tall, old-fashioned annual with melodramatic foot-long drooping red tassels for blooms - was a hint at Brine’s taste for offbeat plants that make a big statement.) “It was a very sensual, atmospheric place,” he continues. “We called it Red Gardens because of all the red brick surrounding us. It was next to an auto body shop, so it was a pretty idyllic setup,” he jokes.
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Friends who admired the little garden asked Brine to design city and rooftop gardens for them, too. By 1984, he had a new career as a landscape designer. He and Julia launched Horticultural Designs and city projects soon gave way to suburban and then rural ones.
Brine’s exuberant design style is hard to pin down. He admits to loving the Japanese esthetic, but after designing just one Japanese garden, he “cut his ties,” he says. “I’m an American, I have to have an American look. In the early days here in Pawling, I had Japanese ornaments, but they’re now hidden away. Granite lanterns, birdbaths - goodbye. You’ve gotta be strict about this sort of thing. I don’t want to be identified with anything other than nature.”
Duncan Brine - principal designer
Nursery
