color, views, seating & more: design lessons from madoo

THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED book “Madoo: The Making of an American Garden,” reminded me of the power of certain key design strategies that can make all the difference—ones that proved to be formative elements in the highly distinctive garden that is Madoo, in Sagaponack, Long Island, which visitors often use words like “magical” to describe.

Madoo was created starting in the 1960s by the late painter and poet Bob Dash, and the book’s authors join me today to talk about some of those garden-making tactics he used and that the garden team there keeps using—like how important it is to consider inside-out views from key windows, and how flourishes of colorful paint (including on the welcoming element of carefully placed garden seating) can unite a landscape’s many elements.

My guests today are Alejandro Saralegui, executive director of the Madoo Conservancy since 2009, and Kendell Cronstrom, a longtime magazine editor (left to right, in the photo below), who have co-authored the book, “Madoo: The Making of an American Garden” (affiliate link).

Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win their new book, “Madoo.”

Read along as you listen to the June 22, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

design lessons from the gardens at madoo

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Margaret Roach: It’s good to talk to you both. And Alejandro, you and I worked recently on a “New York Times” garden column together and that was fun. I hadn’t been to Madoo in a long time, and it was fun to sort of visit it in the book and in talking to you.

So I should say before we get started, that Madoo is open free of charge on certain days. I think it’s weekend afternoons in the spring and fall and Thursday through Sunday afternoons in summer. And I’ll give all the information with the transcript also on how to find out about visiting this very exceptional garden.

Anyway, I loved the origin story of the garden, how Bob Dash spied a property with a historic barn, I think, on it that the real estate agent sort of dismissed as not something to consider, but how he knew it was the place.

And I wonder who wants to tell us about that sort of unconventional beginning of this place?

Alejandro Saralegui: Yeah. Bob Dash had been out with a realtor seeing properties. And as you said, he’s like, “What about that? ” And the realtor was like, “No, you’re not interested in that. ” And Bob was like, “Yes, I am.” And he said he got there and that “It winked at me,” was his expression, which is just super-charming.

And that was 1965 and there was still a cow in the barn, which dated back to 1740. And it was really just sort of the beginning of Madoo. And within two years, between one thing and another, it took him about probably a year and a half to purchase the property and move in. And he moved in for the summer of 1967 and that’s when Madoo started, and he started his little garden in the courtyard, which he sort of created by moving some sheds and such, but living with a Sterno and tomatoes the local farmer had given him.

Margaret: Not a bad beginning. Apparently it worked. Those were good ingredients, I guess; a recipe for success. So then I remember also that how he began the garden-making, actually, was mowing pathways into a meadow. So not like drawing a design on a piece of paper [laughter] and following that, not Landscape Architecture 101 or whatever. So that’s a fun beginning story, too. And I wonder if one of you wants to tell us that part.

Kendell Cronstrom: Yeah, I don’t think there were … I mean, there might’ve been little sketches on cocktail napkins or something like that, but yeah, it was all about just mowing the paths and very simply getting to know the land. And he also started planting around the perimeter standard things like pine trees and that sort of thing before he really got into the busy work of gardening. Sort of like when people move into a house and maybe want to change the kitchen, but they live with it for a while to make sure exactly what their needs are and how they want it to function.

Margaret: Yeah. The idea of him mowing and then stopping [laughter] at a place that was, “Hmm, this is a good spot” or something. It’s kind of delightful, right?

Alejandro: It totally is. And you have to remember that it wasn’t farmland. It was called tractor turnaround land. So it was really meadows. So everyone’s so accustomed out here to either potato fields or cornfields, especially back then. But in this case, it wasn’t farmed. So he’s really cutting through Solidago and Queen Anne’s lace and then literally putting those French strapwork benches in the middle of the field, and having a drink and reading a book. [Above, Bob Dash on one of the strapwork benches.]

Margaret: Right. Some of the benches you’re referring to that are still in the garden today, these metal benches. Yeah. Beautiful. So just again, as a little bit of background and to help us visualize, because not everyone who’s listening has had the privilege of seeing the book, which I’ve been enjoying going back to and looking at the pictures again and again, sort of to help us by painting a visual picture of some of the features of the place, because it has a lot of different areas. But it’s not like a formal English garden of rooms. It’s not that way and yet it does have different areas to it. It’s not just one big garden area.

Alejandro: Exactly. And it’s a 2-acre organic garden and it has somewhere between 15 and 20 garden areas or garden rooms, depending on how you define that. And that’s really part of the magic of Madoo, where it seems much, much larger than the 2 acres.

So I had a tour yesterday with a group of ladies from East Hampton, and they were like halfway through, they were like, “This is only 2 acres.” I was like, “You’ve only seen half.” And that’s where Bob really was very careful. And a lot of it in the front of the garden in particular are those paths that he ended up paving and using. He used these little concrete setts [paving blocks] in red or yellow. And those were the pathways that ended up that started as little moon paths and then they became paved or mulched or whatever. So you get a lot of different areas and they are either historically influenced or geographically influenced. So, for instance, there’s a rill [photo below] that hearkens back to the Islamic world.

Margaret: And that’s just a very narrow channel of water. It’s very-

Alejandro: Exactly.

Margaret: …geometric, very precise. It’s not a stream. And I’ve only seen them in a few gardens elsewhere. There’s a couple of English gardens that I’ve seen them in, but it’s a very dramatic feature.

Alejandro: It is. And in Bob’s case, he had changed it over the years. First, it was just a brick walkway with an object at the end, like a garden sculpture at the end and he called it a view-swiper, and it kind of drove your eye way out into the farm fields, which were only a mile from the ocean and back then you could even see the ocean. And then it changed.

Then he added the Rill, then he added gardens on either side. It was sort of falling apart about five years ago and we had the opportunity to remove it and rebuild it a little tighter and closer to the way it was originally. So as you said, it’s a narrow canal and it has a little brick walkway on either side. So it reads much more minimalist than it did five years ago, but much closer to what it looked like 20 years ago.

And then there’s the Gazebo, there’s a Renaissance little knot garden. There’s a long border, which really goes back to English borders, despite the fact that it’s wonky as hell. Our roses are mostly climbing roses, and they’re walkway roses anciennes [old roses], so influenced by very French formal gardens. There’s a pond with an Asian bridge over it [photo, top of page]. So you get all of these different influences.

Kendell: The way you’re talking about that, I mean, I do think of it as sort of rooms, but not in that very formal way. I mean, although you’ve just described them all very clearly, but I feel like there’s spaces you sort of tumble into, you accidentally discover them while you’re walking through the garden. It’s not a formal experience.

Margaret: And that word experience, I think that word that you just said, Kendell, that’s the word that when we did the Times story together, Alejandro, you said as opposed to formal rooms, there are experiences. Like you get into one and you’re drawn in and then you’re taken in by it. Kendell, do you have a favorite space of all the spaces?

Kendell: I guess I’d say the Gazebo [photo below] because it’s such a place of contemplation, yet oddly it’s right at the center of the garden. It’s sort of like, what would you say? It’s I think of a pinwheel shape or something. Everything, it radiates off of the Gazebo. So it’s like a meeting point, but if you sit inside it, it’s beautifully contemplative, and you can look in any direction and be dazzled by the view.

Margaret: And it’s painted lilac color, I think, or something, it’s like a lavender or lilac color. It’s very beautiful.

So speaking of color, that was something else that really stands out. And I think a lot of us, maybe we think about, “Oh, my house is painted such and such a color” when we’re thinking about making our garden, or adding things to our garden like furniture or whatever it’s going to be. But he had a little bit of a different way of going about it, I think [laughter].

And I think I read in the book that Bob Dash never cut flowers for a vase, and yet even though he’s definitely very much conscious about ways of connecting the inside and the outside, the indoors and the outdoors, it wasn’t by cutting flowers and carrying them indoors. And his way of adding color, it seems like besides plants, there was this thing with paint. And they were very different colors from what’s in his artwork, on his canvases, yes?

Alejandro: Very much so. And it was verboten to cut flowers for the house [laughter]. If anyone ever remembers flowers in the house—because somebody will invariably say, ‘Oh, I’ve seen flowers with Bob’—it’s that they fell or they snapped off, or it’s a branch. Oftentimes he had asparagus in this really great pewter chalice. It would be that sort of thing. Or Colchicum in the fall; he would go to Marders, our local nursery, and buy Colchicum and just leave them on the bookshelves. And all of a sudden there’d be like pink blossoms just sprouting on the bookshelves.

Margaret: Oh, out of the bulbs.

Alejandro: Out of the bulbs. Yeah. Never planted.

Margaret: Great. Yeah.

Alejandro: And yeah, the color began as a contrast to whatever flower was there. So there was a gate and he painted a color to contrast with whatever flower, and the gate and everything used to be quintessentially Hamptons brown shingle and white trim and the inside was all white. And then little by little he started with this gate and he just went at it.

And as you pointed out very smartly, it has nothing to do with his painting. His painting has a very soft … I always think of it as a World War II post-war muted palette. There’s a lot of color, but it’s all grayed out as if you almost didn’t have enough money to get the real bright color.

Kendell: Yeah, it’s not vibrant color. And he also rarely painted flowers. Rarely. That was really interesting.

Margaret: Oh, interesting. Yeah. And so these splashes of paint, these bits of use of paint outside, I mean, they could be on, I think, wasn’t there one that was just sort of a finial. And there’s one, I don’t know which building outside ,there’s a ladder that I think is painted bright yellow or something that’s leaning up against the building. So some of the things are sort of eccentric, but they tie to something else and then that helps the whole place tie together, right, these elements.

Alejandro: At one point he said, “We don’t need so much color.” And to be honest, I’ve actually brought back more color than he had, but I’ve seen it with a lot more color than what we have now, and a lot more mixed up. He was very clever with how he mixed paints. Half the time he’s just mixing buckets of house paint and creating colors, or just buying literally Crayola yellow from Benjamin Moore for a railing, or as you said, those pineapple finials.

I mean, a lot of things have been replaced over the years, but if you scratch something, you’ll oftentimes see three different colors under it [laughter]. He could just change the color on a whim. We don’t have the budget for that. So we kind of have set colors, but they’ll change. We might be painting the house again this fall. It’s probably been 10 years. So within the next year we’ll probably paint and that coloring might change.

Kendell: When he was doing his art, I actually don’t know this, did he ever come up with colors for the exterior hardscaping and that sort of thing, furniture, that sort of thing while he was painting?

Alejandro: Probably because it was half the time … I mean, it wasn’t properly painted. So it would be a mix of oil and acrylic paints, and he’d probably scrape some of his pastel paint into the paint, who knows, but he really was very … It wasn’t very precious, and that’s really interesting to me, too. And it wasn’t like this color is going to stay here for the next 20 years. He thought about it, but it was more: What’s it going to do to the plant next to it today?

Margaret: So how is it going to either highlight that or contrast again that sort of speak to it and …

Alejandro: Exactly.

Margaret: So about the plants, are there some signature plants or qualities of plants that without which it wouldn’t be Madoo, do you think? Are there …

Alejandro: Yeah, I think we have a collection of about 21 beeches on the property. There are a lot of magnolias, both Southern Magnolias, Magnolia grandiflora, and lots of soulangeana in different colors and types. And then obviously there’s the Ginkgo Grove, which are fastigiate ginkgos, which the gardeners prune to about 40 inches in width. So that’s really dramatic looking because they’re 30 feet tall, maybe.

Kendell: Yeah, and they’re limbed up every year.

Alejandro: So they get trimmed and they look like … They are flagpoles. They’re green flagpoles in the middle of the garden.

Kendell: With a smattering of box balls at the very bottom, which is very Alice in Wonderland-like.

Alejandro: And then there’s really special trees. So there’s a quartet of dwarf Kousa dogwoods that are in bloom right now and just look great over by the Rill. There is a Davidia involucrata, the handkerchief tree. We have a really lovely Franklinia. So there’s some great things. It’s an interesting mix. It’s funny because it’s both a plantsman’s garden and a garden designer’s garden, and you don’t see that too often.

Margaret: Right. One usually has the upper hand, right?

Alejandro: Yeah.

Kendell: It’s a great question because I don’t really know if people say that they come to Madoo for the “X.” Even there are so many special plantings, but it’s really interesting.

Margaret: Because some places it’s colorful foliage, or large foliage, or tropicals used in a particular way, or things in containers, or you know what I mean? There’s so many … that you remark, “Oh, that garden has the most wonderful display of” fill in the blank.

So then I wanted to talk just a little bit about the inside-out thing. Well, also before we get away from plants and color, I mean the color, the inside of the house, the colors on the walls and so forth are pretty astonishing, so some of the interior color. And then he seems to have sited things outside to take fullest advantage, to have that sort of inside-out connection to the garden from key things like a dining table or a workbench or things like that.

Alejandro: Yeah. I think the views are very considered from inside, especially as he grew older and was outside less, to be honest. And so you would get that there’s that funny low window in the red living room, and it looks out on this very dense garden, which we’ve made a little more tropical, but it’s pretty much always been very dense. So to my mind, it looks like a Rousseau painting. In August, the leaves are just pushing up against the windows.

Kendell: Straight up against the window. I think all of the windows are very low actually [above] and they really pull you into the garden. It’s pretty extraordinary.

Margaret: Interesting. Yeah, the more glass you have, yeah. And people have always told me—a number of people that I respect who are sort of design experts or whatever—have also said, “Don’t make your window trim too loud in the interior because it will distract you from looking out the window.” But I don’t know if he followed that rule: make it something neutral. [Laughter.]

Alejandro: He wasn’t big on rules. Yeah, I don’t think so. So yeah, there’s that great pink in the library is kind of like-

Kendell: Well, it’s a coral.

Alejandro: And then they’ve got these crazy watermelon-coral window frames inside, which really actually do act as frames to the views out. Whereas in the studio, they’re a very, very, very dark teal. So they almost disappeared, and it’s got lots of mullions on that big window and it’s an old farm—on the outside it has barn doors. It was a working entrance to this barn and that’s where he sited the pond. So he’s inside and he’s looking out on this beautiful pond that he then started with a flat bridge but then later turned into that sort of Asian-inspired bridge.

Margaret: I want to finish up by talking about seating, because one of the things that just struck me so much in the book, which I mentioned the introduction, and which you and I focused on a lot when we worked on the “New York Times” story together, Alejandro, about the garden: When sited carefully, different types of seating can really offer the visitor besides just a place to sit and rest a moment, a whole different view of things. And it seems like Madoo, it seems like you have some incredible spots that people can discover and be welcomed by. So can we talk a little bit about some of the range? I know you mentioned some of the things earlier.

Alejandro: Well, I would probably start with my favorite story of a friend who says she sneaks into Madoo and she goes to the way, way, way back, and she sits in that farm-view garden. So it’s a little mound really. And we put this great bench by French landscape architect Louis Benech there [photo below], and it’s actually very comfortable despite what some of our readers said in “The New York Times.”

Kendell: Oh, did they in the comments? [Laughter.]

Alejandro: Yeah, in the comments, very skeptical about the comfort at Madoo. And you look out at one of the last great farm views in Sagaponack. It’s owned by the Foster family, and there’s an airstrip there. I mean, it’s big and south of that is the ocean, but as I said, you don’t see it, but you still get the ocean breeze right there. It’s this wonderful, wonderful, secret little spot. And this friend of ours says, “Oh yeah, I sneak over there and that’s where I do my writing.” And she lives in Shelter Island, so she actually makes us quite the schlep to get to that special spot. And then the other one that always surprises me are the yellow Adirondack chairs, which do have a lot of [Gerrit] Rietveld in them and a lot of Wave Hill in them and a lot-

Margaret: And so Rietveld, we’re talking about a prominent designer from, I forget what year—early in the 20^th century, the 19-teens. Is that what it was?

Alejandro: And it looks like a very uncomfortable chair, but it puts you at a funny pitch where you really have this great view upward and you see everything from the tulip tree to the Gazebo to the ginkgos to a really large Southern magnolia and the rest of the summer house lawn.

Kendell: They differ slightly in that they have huge arms, which I think Bob used to joke that you could sit there and have a drink. There was plenty of room to have a drink. And they’re very deep, too, so they’re very difficult to get out of [laughter].

Margaret: Right. The pitch is a little bit-

Kendell: The pitch is incredibly steep, but then you’re more than happy to sit there and take in the garden, and it almost forces you to just sit back and relax in the truest sense.

Margaret: And when we’re walking through a garden, which is typically the way that we experience gardens, we’re not really looking up, other than occasionally. We’re frequently very conscious of our feet and lower down in the beds and the borders. Do you know what I mean? And so it really is special, what you just described, Alejandro. It’s a different view literally, and the experience is quite different.

Alejandro: Very different. And also Madoo doesn’t have grand views. I think that that’s one thing that visitors really like. It’s a very sort of approachable place. So I would say the only grand view, true grand view, is the Rill on the back cover of the book. And so you don’t really notice and you’re not looking up too much.

There’s a lot of what I call foot feel, which is all the different feet textures on the ground, whether it’s grass, whether it’s crushed stone, whether it’s pebbles, whether it’s the telephone pole paths [paths inlaid with circular wood pavers cross-cut from telephone poles; photo above]. So you’re sort of concentrating on that and you’re looking down more. But with this seating, you really are forced to look up and take in this really rather incredible breadth of the garden that you do not notice when you’re standing.

Margaret: Yes, we should all be more conscious of which seating and where we place it and so forth. Well, we’re basically out of time. I’m so glad to speak to both of you, Alejandro and Kendel,l and congratulations on the book “Madoo: The Making of an American Garden.” And also congratulations on the enduring thing that is Madoo, that’s great that the Conservancy is doing it and keeping it open. And even though I think Bob said he didn’t want it…what did he say?

Kendell: “Preserved in amber.”

Margaret: Right, “preserved in amber.” But he did want it preserved [laughter]. And so good job, well done, and thank you for making time today to talk about it. And as I said, I’ll give information about visiting and all the goings-on there as well. So thank you. Thank you.

(Photos by Tria Giovan from the book “Madoo: The Making of an American Garden,” except vintage black and white portrait of Bob Dash by John Reed.)

enter to win a copy of ‘madoo’

I’LL BUY A COPY of ““Madoo: The Making of an American Garden,” by Alejandro Saralegui and Kendell Cronstrom for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:

Do you have a favorite spot to sit in your garden (and if so, tell us about it)?

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, June 30, 2026. Good luck to all.

(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

prefer the podcast version of the show?

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the June 22, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).