<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nYou know, I am a control freak, so I like to move everything around,\u201D fashion designer Oscar de la Renta says of his hands-on approach to gardening. He could be talking about a few of his vanda orchids or a hillside of kousa dogwood\u2014the work, not the size of the quarry, is his reward. Despite his view from atop a thriving global brand, De la Renta makes time to pull on a worn polo shirt and some khaki shorts to help his groundsmen with the jobs of cutting back, digging out, and watering in that a well-cared-for landscape requires. He is often joined outdoors by his wife, Annette, who is celebrated among their friends as a ruthless weeder. Together the couple travels between their apartment in Manhattan and two environments where nature just keeps churning out problems for them to fix: a lush Connecticut estate and a beachfront refuge in the Dominican Republic, the designer\u2019s home country. While both properties delight them, it\u2019s the island garden that has won De la Renta\u2019s heart.\n\nHe has had his own place in the D.R. since 1971. The first, a Thai-inspired compound at Casa de Campo, ignited his interest in orchids and in flowering plants with weighty, hallucinatory fragrances, like gardenia, ylang-ylang, and tuberose. But as the resort grew and prospered, his neighbors were less likely to be fellow lotus-eaters than single-digit-handicap golfers. In the late \u201990s the designer and a few others, lured by the untouched beaches of the country\u2019s east coast, partnered to develop a residential enclave at Punta Cana. And so after many years of keeping house on the south shore, the De la Rentas started all over.\n\n\u201CI thought I could re-create our Casa de Campo garden here,\u201D the designer explains of the plot, which, when the couple bought it, was a tangle of hardwood trees fringed with sand the color of a Ladur\u00E9e vanilla macaron. \u201CBut even though we were only an hour east by car, the climate was much drier, and sometimes unbearably windy. I failed with so many shrubs that I realized the only thing to put on the front lawn were palms, grasses, and uva de playa [sea grape].\u201D In September of 1998, just months after the pair\u2019s Palladian-style villa had been completed and the plants installed, Hurricane Georges dispatched with the garden, the pool, the trees, and much of the private beach. Only the coral-stone residence remained.\n\nFourteen years later, De la Renta\u2019s hard-won wisdom is on breathtaking display. Sheltered behind a windbreak of sea grape is a grassy lawn; the garden per se is behind the villa, laid out in a simple grid that draws on lessons from the great Russell Page, who established the bones of the De la Rentas\u2019 acreage in Connecticut more than 30 years ago.\n\nIn Punta Cana, the designer has benefited from the experience of his friend Sarah Berm\u00FAdez, an accomplished plantswoman from the city of Santiago de los Caballeros, and learned to appreciate what this microclimate provides. He fertilizes with Sargasso seaweed harvested from the beach at low tide. He plants native species almost exclusively. And yet the man who has masterminded countless runway spectaculars doesn\u2019t shy from making the occasional grand gesture. When he discovered the plot was essentially rock face cloaked in five inches of topsoil, he trucked in enough additional dirt to allow trees and shrubs to root properly. The result? A rippling sea of green that tosses up a raft of color every now and then\u2014purple petrea, yolk-yellow night-blooming jasmine, and jade vine, whose extra-terrestrial turquoise blooms can grow to ten feet long. The garden is now \u201Ca small jungle,\u201D he says, that effectively screens the entire compound from passersby.\n\nThere is much more here to screen than there was in \u201998. The De la Rentas entertain generously and often, and the number of outbuildings has multiplied. A snaking drive brings visitors through groves of mahogany, lignum vitae, and cedar to the villa and a tiny but perfectly proportioned chapel that face each other across a crunching gravel courtyard. A shaded walkway leads to Casa Eliza, where Annette\u2019s daughter Eliza and her husband, Alex Bolen, stay when they visit; the Bolens work with the designer in Manhattan, Eliza as head of Oscar de la Renta brand licensing, Alex as CEO. Behind the chapel are the orchids and the greenhouse, both a short distance down a path hemmed with sago palms and bird-of-paradise. A proper all\u00E9e framed by clipped syzygium (a doppelg\u00E4nger for boxwood) guides the way to a garden room furnished with succulents, bromeliad, and cactus\u2014the culmination of De la Renta\u2019s love affair with tropical hues and forms, and perhaps the best measure of his success in going native.\n\n\u201CA lot of these plants come from the property or nearby,\u201D he observes. \u201CThey are very easy to move because you don\u2019t even have to take the roots out\u2014you just cut them and put them into the ground.\u201D Anyone could do it, in other words. And yet the composition of shapes and colors on pebbled ground hums with his artistry, from passages of variegated agave and golden-barrel cactus to rigorously scaled walkways that meet in a cross. Here is a legendary fashion designer working in a complementary key.\n\n\u201CI love symmetry in the garden,\u201D De la Renta says. \u201CBut you have to have a mixture. You need to contain things in a certain manner, and then other areas you can just let go.\u201D\n\nAnd where exactly would those be? The unruly stretches seem to shrink by the season. Near the entrance to his Dominican Eden, De la Renta has installed an all\u00E9e containing many of the fruit and spice trees of the island. \u201CI have cinnamon,\u201D he says, \u201Cand something called cajuiles [cashews]. The fruit has zero taste. But it is the most beautiful color.\u201D\n\nClick here to see the slide show of Oscar de la Renta&amp;#39;s lush gardens."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/oscar-de-la-renta-dominican-republic-garden-article>