About 15 years ago, Ngaere Macray bought 40 acres of old potato fields in Sagaponack, N.Y., and started to build a house and garden.
She was raised in England, the land of hedges and walled outdoor garden "rooms," so these, as if in her blood, began to take shape around the western side of the house, which rises unobstrusively out of the fields.And last week, on a very sunny, very windy day, I took shelter in a rectangular, 30-by-45-foot room formed by 10-foot-high beech hedges. I sat on a Lutyens bench basking in the sun, out of the wind, and listened to the rustling of the leaves.
European beech trees have lustrous green leaves in summer. But come frost, they turn a coppery brown and fall from the twiggy branches only when pushed off by the new pale green buds of spring.
Sound is one of the best things about beech hedges. And you could put a vegetable garden inside a beech room to keep the deer out. Or as with this one, just leave it a peaceful blank.
Macray is the publisher of Sagapress Inc., which resides in a little shed on the edge of the garden and specializes in books on horticulture, landscape design and garden history.
"When I designed the beech room, I was terribly into Gertrude Jekyll," Macray said, "and I was going to have little square beds edged with lavender."
Then a book on Innisfree, a garden in Millbrook, N.Y., inspired by Chinese principles, made her realize that she liked the beech room empty.
The simplicity of this room - just four walls of rustling, burnished leaves in winter, with the gray interlaced branches showing beneath - makes it a calm, meditative place.
European beech (Fagus sylvatica), rather than American beech (F. grandi-folia), is used for hedges because it transplants more easily and takes shearing well. It also stands up to salt winds.
European hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) and the American hornbeam (C. carolin-i-ana) can also be used to make an outdoor room - or a deer fence - but their branches and stems, with regular clipping, weave themselves into a solid hedge, as dense as privet. The beauty of the European beech is that its more open, gray branches let in the light.
I began to wonder if you could grow a beech room if you didn't have hedges in your veins. Macray is a bit like someone out of an E.M. Forster novel. Her father was the governor of Abeokuta, a western region of Nigeria, before the country gained its independence, and she was raised in English boarding schools. The short time she spent in Nigeria, "it was very much tea at 4 and cricket," she said.
So, there's a bit of the old empire in these fields - but the meadow is pure American, with sheep fescue and gaillardia abloom in summer. And the combination of seeming opposites is satisfyingly sturdy, like Macray herself. She eventually married the man who helped her design the garden and found all the plants: David Seeler, a landscape architect and the owner of the Bayberry, a nursery in Amagansett, N.Y. But this is a story of a hedge.
Macray started with fairly large trees - 2 to 3 inches thick - which cost $200 each, or $6,000 for the 30 it took to grow this room. But you don't have to spend such a fortune, if you're willing to start with whips (young seedling trees, about 2 feet tall) from a local or mail-order nursery. Forestfarm, in Oregon, for instance, sells them for about $5 each (catalogue, $3, from Forestfarm, 990 Tetherow Road, Williams, OR 97544).
Or you could gather beechnuts in the fall, let them sprout in a dark, damp place (a potting shed or basement is fine) and plant them in a nursery row in the spring.
Macray did this with a whole bag of sprouted seeds her mother sent from England about 16 years ago. "I rowed them out like carrots, about a foot apart, in my vegetable garden," she said. Two years later, she transplanted them to a nursery field. And about 10 years ago, she and Seeler planted 70 of them, 8 feet apart, in a great oval just north of the house.
"It's our cathedral," Macray said. "You see them like this in Scotland. In 30 years, the branches will form a ceiling right over the top." But to get back to this hedge.
Macray planted her hedge trees in a trench about 2 feet deep.
"I bought trees with root balls about 12 to 14 inches across, so I put them right up against each other," she said. "But if you use whips, plant them in a triangular fashion - zigzagging them along the trench - about 12 inches apart."
Good drainage is essential to healthy trees, so if you have heavy, clay soil, put sand in the bottom of the trench and add plenty of compost. Watering is also essential, so lay a soaker hose along the line of trees and turn it on five or six hours once a week during the dry season.
Since Macray started with 4-foot trees, it took only four years for their clipped branches to lace themselves into an airy wall.
She let the young trees grow, uncut, for several years. Then one August, after the season's growth stopped, they were "tipped back" a couple of inches to encourage branching. They grew for two more years and were tipped back again.
In a few years, when the trees get bushy, you square them off the way you would a privet hedge. Set up bamboo poles or stakes at the height you want - usually about 10 feet - and run string along the sides of the hedge, as a guideline. As the trees grow, the hedge gets wider, but don't let it get beyond 5 feet, or you won't be able to reach across the top with your clippers.