In the Garden with Mim
A half-acre gets sculpted into a work of art.
By Kelly Ann Smith

“I was good with patina,” says Adrienne Shwartz, aka Mim, in the backyard of her Amagansett home, where she has lived since 1965. I am admiring a set of garden gates she fashioned 12 years ago from bronze to resemble a fisherman’s net, using a painstaking process of forms, a foundry and chemicals.

Indeed the artist’s entire home has a wonderful patina that one cannot achieve using artificial means. Yet it has been a process, truly organic.

“I use everything so it looks like more,” she says of her half-acre yard filled with vegetable gardens, berry patches, wildflowers, trees, sculptures, picnic tables, swinging Clover chairs and even a koi pond.

A lush fig tree stands next to her ten-foot-tall, fiberglass “ET Molecular Mod Mim.” (Mim works her name into most of her structures.) Although it is early autumn, most of the figs have yet to ripen. She finds one almost ripe and gives it to me. It is delicious and I yearn someday to have a yard that yields as much as Mim’s.

“The soil is so great here. It’s special because of the glaciers,” she says. “They call it Bridgehampton loam.”

From the earliest of the French sorrel to the horseradish still growing in her garden beds, Mim has found a way to make the most out of her property.

Raspberries, strawberries, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, Tuscan kale, beets, squash and various peppers have all been picked, eaten, given away, put into soups, jarred and pickled.

Mim has not planned her garden like many south-of-the-highway homes perpetually organized by landscapers. At this point it’s a matter of finding the room and planting, and if it does well, great; if not, so be it. Even as the growing season is calming down, you can tell that under her care, most plants prosper.

She is quick to give props to her younger helpers like Jacob Hamilton, who built up her garden boxes so she doesn’t have to bend all the way down to the ground.

“My knees are not what they used to be,” she says.

Mary Beth Lee helps with potted plants and brings Mim unusual plants she might find interesting, such as the Aristolochia that Mim twisted around a string on a ledge. “I can’t wait for it to bloom,” she says of the burgundy-and-cream pelican flower.

And Paul Cleary, who built her outside deck to match her outdoor art studio as well as her standard poodle Sugar’s cedar doghouse. Mim planted moonflowers at the porch entrance so when her son, Cliff Black, stays over he can smell them when he comes home at night.

Mim is most proud, however, of her asparagus patch.

“Isn’t it pretty?” she asks as we stand in front of a 6-foot fuzzy wall.

“I have to tie it back. If I didn’t, it would be all over the ground.”

“I can’t eat all the asparagus,” Mim said. “I can’t give it away—I have lots of vegetables.”

She has even incorporated asparagus in a resin table in the living-room section of her home using a process much like mummification. They still look fresh as the day they were picked—and that was 30 years agoend.

“I’ve always had a thing for vegetables,” she says.

Kelly Ann Smith runs locally owned holdout, A Little of What You Fancy, in East Hampton, and writes from her home in Springs.