It’s harvest time at Robert and Susan Summer’s weekend house. And that doesn’t mean a bushel of apples here and a few pears there.
Very shortly, the couple, whose home base is a Manhattan apartment, will lead a small army of temporary helpers through their five-acre chardonnay vineyard. The group will hand-pick bunches of grapes, which will then be carted off to a nearby winery to be crushed and, eventually, turned into a private-label wine.
And very soon the pinot noirs will be ready; the apples and pears, too.
This is power gardening: high-end horticulture about as high as it can go and a passion among the landed gentry of the 1990s. It can be glimpsed through hedges and fences from coast to coast, but its apotheosis just may be the ever-evolving 44-acre Summer estate.
The Summers’ grounds, which boast five rose gardens and a vegetable garden a block and a half long, have been under development for five years. The Summers decline to estimate what they have spent on their plantings.
“I wouldn’t even like to know,” Mrs. Summer says.
And there is much more in development: a secret garden with a maze; a fantasy cabin made of logs and branches; and a German-style garden along an embankment.
The designer, an Englishman, calls the whole project, now just 75 percent complete, “horticulture as decoration.” Versailles, the extravagant home of the French royals just before the revolution, comes to mind.
Two sentry boxes (sans sentries) flank the entry to the property. The white gravel drive leads to a 23-room Tuscan-style villa. There is a four-bedroom guest house; a private art gallery is being built.
In addition to the rose gardens, the Alice-in-Wonderland-like landscape features two swimming pools, gazebos topped with turrets, spiraling topiaries and a meandering white boardwalk. Four stone cherubs–one playing a flute, another a violin–stand along the paths through the property’s woods.
The formal vegetable garden is fenced with white Chippendale-style panels and planted with zucchini, eggplant, cherry and beefsteak tomatoes, strawberries, fennel, onions, chives, carrots, bell peppers, chili peppers, asparagus and cabbage.
“I wanted something unique, something whimsical. I wanted it to be warm and welcoming rather than so formal you couldn’t go in and pick the vegetables,” says Mrs. Summer, the 55-year-old president of Dimensional Media Associates, a 3-D imaging company based in New York. Her husband, who is 64 and the former president of Sony Music International, is now chief executive officer of Dimensional Media.
Anybody can garden. Gardening on the level of the Summers, however, requires manpower, equipment and plantings beyond most people’s imagination, or means.
The Summers have on staff one full-time gardener, one part-time gardener and a property manager who pitches in when necessary; they trim the topiaries, weed the formal vegetable garden, scrub the boardwalk, keep the endless stretches of white woodwork freshly painted and, almost unceasingly, alter the landscape. Seasonal teams of four and five are called in for heavier projects.
“There’s always planting going on and things being moved around here,” says Barbara Babiyan, who manages the property for the Summers. “It takes half a day just to water everything.”
The Summers have themselves boiled pots of water and garlic to make beetle repellent, spraying their roses, pruning their vines, bottling pears and apples and making strawberry jam.
“I can’t tell you I’m out in the garden every day, but I’m certainly on the phone every day,” says Mrs. Summer.
She once owned a flower shop; but before she and her husband bought the property in Warren, in northwestern Connecticut, about a two-hour drive from Manhattan, neither had ever planted anything. It was while deciding what to do with their property in 1990 that the couple saw the perfect opportunity to create their fantasy working garden.
“They didn’t take the standard view,” says George Carter, the English garden designer hired to realize the Summers’ vision. His design was inspired by 17th Century Dutch gardens, 18th Century French gardens and the sets of 1930s musicals like “Top Hat.”
“Most people want to underplay the artificial elements,” says Carter. “The Summers wanted to create theatrical illusions. It’s fairly surreal and doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen.”
Carter and the Summers came up with a long-term plan.
“You can’t necessarily afford to do it all at once,” says Carter. “Susan stretched the boundaries. Her planting ideas were very nonindigenous to Connecticut. She would mention the baroque palaces of Germany and Italy and I would reinterpret it.”
The project, he adds, “just goes on forever.”
Easily the couple’s most ambitious project to date has been their chardonnay vineyard. They consulted with soil analysts from Cornell University, bought vines in France, had them cloned onto New York stock and finally planted seedlings five years ago.
In August, the Summers spent three weekends pruning the vines by hand, and now it’s time to pick the grapes.
“We didn’t want the plants handled by machinery,” explains Mrs. Summer. “Our whole office comes for the weekend, plus our children and their friends.”
In 1998, they plan to market 10,000 bottles of the chardonnay under a private label. Mrs. Summer calls the project “not unaffordable. It’s not an outrageous luxury.”
Better yet, the chardonnay “is absolutely sensational,” she boasts. “We expect to make money from it.”
