Quietly tucked in a hidden bend of Sagaponack, I had the pleasure of visiting the enchanting Madoo Gardens last summer with my college roommate—an intimate, almost secret world where art and nature gently blur.
Madoo reads as a living autobiography—an idea central to its founder, artist Robert Dash, who approached the garden as he did his canvases, layering saturated color, architectural follies, and evolving plantings into a composition that shifts with the seasons.
Dash’s life and work were intertwined with an extraordinary circle, including artists Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, and poet John Ashbery, transforming Madoo into an Arcadian salon where creative exchange flourished. Today, under the stewardship of Executive Director Alejandro Saralegui—whose career spans the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the worlds of publishing and horticulture—the garden continues to evolve as Dash intended: never fixed, always in motion.
This spirit of the land is beautifully captured in the forthcoming book, Madoo: The Making of an American Garden, co-authored by Saralegui and Kendell Cronstrom—a portrait of a place where color, creativity, and cultivated wildness remain in constant, inspired dialogue.
Book available June 2026, Executive Director Alejandro Saralegui & Leslie Newsom Rascoe
To pre-order the book: madoo.org/products/madoo-the-making-of-an-american-garden
Photos by Leslie Newsom Rascoe and Madoo Conservancy, Book Cover by Tria Giovan