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GardenLarge, the Brine Garden, Duncan and Julia Brine

Brine Garden’s Edible Shrubs & Kitchen Gardener’s Jennifer Bartley

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  • PlantersPlace.com | The Kitchen Garden | Edible Shrubs at the Brine Garden

    • I met Duncan Brine at the Garden Writers Association Symposium last year in Portland but it wasn’t until yesterday that I got a peek at his fabulous garden in the Hudson Valley.

      Duncan and his wife Julia have transformed their six acre property into a paradise garden of framed views, vistas, meandering pathways, and places to sit and take it all in. The garden is a study in naturalistic design emphasizing the artistic use of native trees, shrubs and perennials. As we meandered through the vast garden we snacked on some ripe edible berries and talked about homemade preserves and jellies.

“Eden Reconsidered” A Passionate Appreciation of the Brine Garden

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“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.