“Eden Reconsidered”
A Passionate Appreciation of the Brine Garden
by Marilyn Bethany

At once naturalistic and theatrical, Brine’s garden challenges every assumption.  A knowledgeable plantsman who teaches off-season at the New York Botanical Garden, he confidently tosses together commonplace natives with rare and exquisite exotics, mass plantings with specimens, fine tuning each close-up but always with an eye to the big picture.  His garden has no apparent edges: it flows, not so much from “room-to-room,” as we’ve been taught a garden should, but from atmospheric eco-system to eco-system. If this is theatre, it is in the round, not trapped inside a proscenium arch.  At every turn, there’s a surprise, yet, in the end, it all seems inevitable, as if Brine got permission to bend nature to his whim.

All good gardens are instructive.  This one?  It will blow your mind.