Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/65912
Ms. Brooks is in a whirl every April as she supervises new plantings, helps old clients add new features, and checks out current proj- ects: gardens, parterres, orchards, country lanes, allées, lawns, pathways, formal "rooms" and wildly romantic plantings in the U.S., Italy, Spain, Greece and Great Britain. "In my dream world, people would call in July—September at the lat- est," she says. "And then I could plant in the autumn." But, as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." When a loyal client decides in April that there should be a vegetable garden, or that an existing garden should somehow be made prettier, how can she say no? Ms. Brooks is veddy, veddy British, born in Lancashire and raised in Hert- fordshire. She worked under the British grande dame Arabella Lennox-Boyd, 74 CULTURED who has famously designed three gardens for Sting and Trudie Styler, the most recent of which, in Tuscany, was featured last year in Architectural Digest. When Ms. Brooks moved with her (now ex-) husband to New York some 15 years ago "it was jolly slow because I didn't know anyone," she said. No American landscape designer seemed the right mentor, so she set out on her own. "I got a tiny little job," she said. "But it takes so long for a gar- den to look like anything." The jobs are tiny no more. One project, for the art and design collector Adam Lindemann and his wife, gallerist Amalia Dayan, involved transforming a windy site in Montauk, Long Island, into a hearty compendium of low na- tive grasses, formal hedges, diagonal walkways and meandering pathways. Mr. Lindemann told her that there would be an outdoor sculpture. "I'd al- ready gotten quite far when Adam said, 'Here it is.' "It," as it turned out, PHOTO BY JEAN BER COURTESY GALERIE KREO