As we prepare to stage our inaugural Long Island show, Fleurs de Villes: Autumn (October 8-12, 2025) at the luxury Americana Manhasset shopping center, a fresh floral celebration of the famous “golden season,” let’s explore the floral story of this famous New York vacation spot and bucolic refuge from city life.

From sandy dune-edge marshes to the manicured parterres of the Gold Coast, Long Island’s floral history charts an arc from Indigenous stewardship to the extravagant plantings of barons and aesthetes. The island’s gardens are both artifacts and acts of conservation, places where imported specimens and native species negotiate space, light, and the long Atlantic wind. At the heart of that story are a handful of estates and arboreta whose collections still teach gardeners how to reconcile taste with climate.

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FLORAL HISTORY 

Botanically speaking, Long Island favours a palette that reads practical and pretty: hydrangeas, rhododendrons and azaleas flourish in acidic pockets; roses thrive where winter protection and thoughtful pruning meet; camellias and magnolias punctuate early spring with architecture as much as bloom. Hardy panicle hydrangeas have surged in popularity for their sun tolerance and predictable colour, while classic mophead and lace cap types continue to define suburban foundation plantings. Fall dahlias populate cutting gardens and estate borders, sustaining a local market for florist-grade blooms and seasonal festivals. Native wildflowers – goldenrod, aster and various meadow grasses – persist in meadows and restored coastal buffers, reminding the visitor that not all beauty arrived via steamship. 

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CELEBRITY SIGHTINGS 

Celebrities and gardens have a long, mutual romance on Long Island. The Gold Coast was a social magnet, attracting financiers and cultural figures whose gardens became circulated conversation pieces. Estates hosted parties where floral displays were not mere décor but statements: roses arranged with theatrical abundance, hydrangeas massed to create blue-green clouds on estate slopes. Later, film crews found in those same gardens perfect cinematic backdrops; Old Westbury and Hempstead House have appeared in motion pictures, translating floral opulence into visual shorthand for wealth and longing. 

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) was inspired by the Gold Coast’s estates – spaces literally built during the Roaring Twenties – to re-stage Fitzgerald’s imagined excess. Hydrangea borders and manicured lawns lent Jay Gatsby’s parties a botanical authenticity. Here the blue mopheads and pale climbing roses became emblems of fragile beauty against reckless decadence.

NOTABLE ESTATES AND GARDENS AS CINEMATIC SETTINGS

Oheka Castle in Huntington has enjoyed perhaps the most flamboyant film career. Its formal gardens, modeled after Versailles, inspired Citizen Kane’s Xanadu. When Taylor Swift filmed Blank Space there, the gardens’ axial lines and rose-draped fountains weren’t background – they were integral to the parody of fairytale romance gone wrong, referencing the song’s lyric “a rose garden full of thorns.” 

The North Shore’s Sands Point Preserve, once Castle Gould and later the Guggenheim retreat, and now Hempstead House, narrates how celebrity and horticulture intersected. Daniel Guggenheim’s estate, like others of the era, was a stage for social and artistic life: aviators such as Charles Lindbergh were known visitors at Falaise, and the grounds have hosted generations of cultural gatherings. The estate’s formal gardens, alleés and sheltered courtyards illustrated the Gold Coast habit of using imported ornament and plant material to craft privileged landscapes – places where social capital and botanical spectacle reinforced one another. The house was built with a sunken “Palm Court” that once housed 160 species of rare orchids. It has appeared in Scent of a Woman (1992), with Al Pacino’s tango echoing through its ornate halls, and also popped up in Malcolm X (1992) and period piece Boardwalk Empire. With its stone terraces softened by ivy and its sunken gardens, the setting’s blend of architectural formality and wild Long Island shoreline gives directors both grandeur and intimacy. One could argue the clipped boxwood and coastal grasses perform a supporting role, grounding the human drama in a lived-in, landscaped world.

Old Westbury Gardens, with its restrained English-style formalism, reads like an instructive counterpoint. Built by the Phipps family in the early 1900s and opened to the public in 1959, its avenues, classical follies and perennial borders have made the grounds a repeated film and photography location and a favorite for events. Old Westbury’s gardens emphasize structure – lawn, vista, temple – while still staging lavish summer displays of peonies, iris and roses, the latter often trimmed and trained in traditional ways that betray their transatlantic inspirations. 

When Martin Scorsese brought Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence (1993) to Old Westbury Gardens as a film, he wasn’t simply renting a backdrop. He was capturing the peonies, roses, and wisteria-draped pergolas that whisper Gilded Age restraint. The neoclassical geometry of the garden itself, designed for follies, vistas and promenades, reinforced the film’s themes of appearances and confinement. 

Even lesser-known filming sites like Caumsett State Historic Park, once Marshall Field III’s estate on a peninsula, put their plantings on screen. Whether a simple stretch of meadow grasses or the alleés of mature lindens, the camera captures Long Island’s horticultural legacy as much as its architecture.

GARDENING LANDMARKS AND HISTORY

Long Island’s gardening history also includes quieter revolutions. Local horticultural societies and public gardens have shifted priorities from purely aesthetic collecting to ecological resilience – introducing native understory plants, supporting pollinators through meadow restoration and rethinking lawn management. 

Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay exemplifies the Gold Coast’s marriage of architecture and ambitious planting. Created in the early 20th century for William Robertson Coe and his wife Mai, the estate grew under the hands of designers such as Guy Lowell and the Olmsted Brothers into a living encyclopedia: magnolias, rhododendrons, azaleas and an astonishing rose arbor that today houses hundreds of cultivars. Its camellia house, greenhouses and conservatories preserve specimens that were once markers of status and now serve conservation and education missions. The site’s recent pivot toward ecological stewardship – replacing certain non-native specimens with resilient natives and commissioning contemporary designers – shows how Long Island gardens are evolving rather than fossilizing. The gardens are so sublime, they even host free monthly meditation sessions there. World-famous garden designer Piet Oudolf (New York’s High Line) will be designing a brand new garden here for fall 2026.

Bayard Cutting Arboretum embodies another strand: the 19th-century arboreal experiment. Laid out with input from Frederick Law Olmsted and later curators who consulted the Arnold Arboretum, Cutting’s “Westbrook” estate favoured informal plantings, broad meadows and a conifer collection that cultivated variety for both study and public enjoyment. The gift of the property to the state in the mid-20th century turned private experimentation into a public resource, preserving veteran oaks and a legacy of botanical curiosity. Gardening workshops and farm grown flowers are available for purchase seasonally. 

Long Island’s floral story keeps unspooling in the hands of caretakers who move between preservation and innovation. Its gardens are repositories of horticultural fashion, social history and botanical experimentation, and they remain public classrooms where the choices of a previous century – imported specimens, formal plantings, lavish rose gardens – are being reinterpreted for a faster-warming future, for pollinators, and for visitors who want both beauty and meaning.

Join us for Fleurs de Villes: Autumn, October 8-12, 2025 at Americana Manhasset