This month sees the publication by Monacelli of Planting Fields: A Place on Long Island. Gilded Age country estates on Long Island’s Gold Coast are not unusual—there were originally 500 of them—but this one is, not least because the house and its 400 landscaped acres have survived, more or less intact, as a public arboretum and state park. I contributed a chapter that tells a fifty-year story of agency and contingency, of strong-willed owners and talented designers, and of the accidental events that interfered with their plans and dreams.

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