Watching Their Garden Grow

“I was painting the peonies,” Schlesinger says of this 1989 picture of his easel by a flowerbed and their first terrier, Louise. Photo: Eric Boman

It’s a kind of a romantic ruin,” says Peter Schlesinger of this 19th-century farmhouse just outside the village of Bellport, Long Island, that he and Eric Boman found in 1981. “It was a total wreck; I mean, it would have been torn down if we hadn’t bought it.”

Bellport and its environs have long attracted people who work in the arts, media, and fashion. Boman, who died in 2022, was an accomplished photographer (and, before that, an illustrator). Schlesinger, now a ceramicist, started out as a painter but has also been a photographer (he’s published two photo books: A Checkered Past and A Photographic Memory). Schlesinger and Boman met in London in 1971 and moved together to New York in 1978.

They bought this house after renting in Fire Island Pines for a couple of summers and deciding that owning there wasn’t for them. “We wanted a place we could go to all year round, and we wanted a garden and a nice house,” Schlesinger says. Boman “loved gardens, but he had never experienced doing a garden.” Schlesinger grew up with one in the San Fernando Valley. Boman took charge of fixing up the house and Schlesinger the garden.

The garden they planned was not anything like the ones they had seen living in the U.K. “English gardens were with borders, rooms, all that English-y thing that everyone was doing,” Schlesinger says. “But Eric,” whose roots were Swedish, “hated that, and I also thought that was wrong for an American wooden house to have formal gardens.”

The main house was built in 1835 and expanded in the 1860s. “In the teens, it was owned by Bernard Baruch,” Schlesinger says. “And when they incorporated the Village of Bellport, they drew the line just outside of Baruch’s land,” which is why the house is officially in East Patchogue. When Schlesinger and Boman moved in, the house was surrounded by a lawn in plain view of their neighbors, other than some beautiful old trees.

Over the decades, Boman took photographs of the house and garden as both evolved, planning to do a book. These are some of them.

The property, consisting of just under two acres, as it was in 1981 when a fence divided the house from the garage; it was the first thing Schlesinger took down. Photo: Eric Boman

The house as it looked when Schlesinger and Boman bought it in 1981. “You can see the fence on the right. The shutters were then painted red, and the wooden arbor that was in front of a side door was later moved.” Photo: Eric Boman

The first pergola was painted white in 1989 and went in place of where the fence had been. Photo: Eric Boman

“I had a little orchard of fruit trees,” Schlesinger says of this photo from 1995, “and at some point, they got full of diseases and bugs, but we had them for a few years before they got so sickly. I planted two apples, two plums, two peaches, and the only thing left now are two quinces.” Photo: Eric Boman

The arbor with roses in full bloom. Photo: Eric Boman

“The olive jar was in various places,” Schlesinger says of the large terra-cotta jar that was a gift from Senga Mortimer, “but this is its final place.” Photo: Eric Boman

“This little urn is still here; it’s a copy of an old iron urn and we made this plinth for it, and for a while I put a planted pot in there.” A very old copper beech had been in this spot before it died. Photo: Eric Boman

“In the corner of the flower beds, I planted these junipers and they started to take up so much room that I limbed them up,” Schlesinger says of the trees at the border of his wild-looking beds in a photograph taken in 2011. Photo: Eric Boman

A large rose bush that grows with the wisteria. Photo: Eric Boman

The screened-in porch is where Schlesinger spends most of his time in the house during the summer. Here in 2022, the year before he cut down the wisteria that was pulling down the porch. The chair-cushion fabric is from Rose Cumming. Photo: Eric Boman

“The magnolias were the first thing I planted,” Schlesinger says, “and I didn’t realize they would become trees! And those are beautiful camellias,” he says of the orange flowering bushes on either side. This view is of the dining-room windows. Photo: Eric Boman

One of the many still-life photographs Boman took of the flowers from their garden, each one in different vases on a different table. Photo: Eric Boman