It’s a time-honored story. After experiencing the rolling hills, the beautiful beaches, and the quaint towns of Martha’s Vineyard, visitors fall in love with it, returning every year. If they’re lucky, they eventually buy a “piece of the rock,” as some like to say.

That was the case for Bob Deresiewicz and his wife, Karen. Both had spent time in Massachusetts’s abundant beach communities – Karen in Gloucester and Bob on the Cape – before coming to Martha’s Vineyard. As avid cyclists, they explored the Island’s terrain by riding along its meandering roads, experiencing firsthand its beauty and solitude. Along the way, they fell in love with its culture.  The couple have returned to the Vineyard every summer since. 

In 2008, they began looking for a home of their own in Edgartown. “We knew we wanted something not too far from town and not too far from the bike path, but also something that would really feel rural and like the Vineyard,” he recalled.

After looking at numerous properties, including some undeveloped land, they discovered a newly built spec house abutting Slough Farm in Katama. “We saw this house and my wife, in particular, fell in love with it,” Deresiewicz recollected. However, when they bought it in 2018, it had no landscaping at all.

The couple – no strangers to landscape design – hired Dan Gordon, founding principal at Dan Gordon Landscape Architects, to help create a plan. They had worked with him to design the landscaping on two other properties, including their home in Newton, Massachusetts. “Investing in the landscape is something that we happily do,” Deresiewicz said. 

Left to their own devices, Deresiewicz said that he and Karen probably would have landscaped it “like the kinds of things that maybe you see along North Water Street,” referring to the formal gardens that are the hallmark of downtown Edgartown. Instead, Gordon drew inspiration from what he refers to as “borrowed agrarian landscape,” such as the bucolic view of Slough Farm’s Icelandic ponies grazing in paddocks behind the property. 

“The Vineyard feel tends to be a little bit more artistic and contemporary, but then [we drew] on the natural materials like weathered wood and stone for clean, simple details with a little bit of flourish,” said Gordon.

Since the builder had cleared the land, that gave Gordon the opportunity to start from scratch. He and Patrick Taylor, a principal at Dan Gordon Landscape Architects, had the idea of shifting from a more finished landscape at the front of the property, to shorter, less designed and more naturalized plantings at the back of the property, which faces the farm. 

That aligned with the couple’s goals. They wanted the space to be pastoral and to invite the outside in. “That is always what we strive for with the properties we’ve done with Dan,” Deresiewicz said, “with natural places for birds and places for other creatures to just be.” 

Gordon and his team also wanted to create interesting, inspiring spaces, and to ensure that the property had plenty of privacy. To accomplish the first goal, they moved the driveway, which originally ran directly from the road to the garage at the side of the house. It now cuts across the front of the house, to a courtyard in front of the garage. “We wanted to bring people into the [property],” Gordon explained.

Privacy from the road was created by planting a variety of mostly native cedars mixed with arborvitaes. In addition to the evergreen, they added viburnum and witch hazel with a margin of goldenrod, native grasses, Russian sage, and geraniums to give it the feel of an established meadow. 

The façade of the house, with its farmer’s porch, gave Gordon an opportunity to bring a more manicured style to the front, by setting it off with the privet hedge. “The result is a little bit of an extra cocoon,” Deresiewicz said, “but when you stand up, you can see the meadow in front of it, ending with the conifers up against the road.”

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The largest puzzle to solve with the landscaping was where to put the swimming pool. “Our initial thought was that the pool would go in the back of [the house],” Deresiewicz recalled. The builder had planned, and even gotten the permitting, to build a pool directly behind the house. But that placement would have interfered with both the views of the farm and the owners’ desire for open space. 

They purchased the property next door around the same time as their home purchase, and they chose to rent the two cottages in the front of that property for local housing, which left the back half available for development. This gave them an opportunity to change the location of the pool entirely. 

At the time, the expanse that would become the pool area was deeply wooded. Deresiewicz was hesitant to cut down so many well-established trees to facilitate the open area necessary for a pool. “The team convinced us that we would replace [the trees] with a fair number of other places where animals could live comfortably.” With this solution, they ended up with a design that would flow seamlessly between the two properties.

It also gave them the opportunity to create the pool of their dreams: they opted for a longer length, to provide space for lap swimming. “We didn’t have a need for a very shallow end, and the height of the water table limited us to the depth of the pool.” Plus, the size was perfect for the couple’s two Labrador retrievers. “It’s a great pool for them to jump into and swim.” 

The pergola is a particular draw. “We do a lot of entertaining under the pergola,” he said. Originally, it was going to be open to the sky without any protection from the sun, but Deresiewicz felt they needed a little bit of shade, so the landscape team sourced a simple bamboo fence from The Home Depot, which was put on top to soften the sunlight. 

Formal perennial gardens on the east and west side of the pool round out the look and extend to the meadow. “Left to my own devices, I probably would have put Endless Summer [hydrangeas], which is that very blue hydrangea that’s everywhere,” Deresiewicz said. Instead, the landscape architects chose a color palette designed to match late spring through early fall, when the pool is used. 

“It’s not a cascade of bright colors with a changing palette at various times, like some perennial gardens,” he pointed out. 

In the back of both gardens, cedars add height, while the next layer consists of Joe pye weed that produces a mass of beautiful muted purple flowers. In various points throughout the gardens, two off-white species of hydrangeas, Little Lime and Limelight, provide white puffy flowers all summer long, transforming to shades of rosy-pink, red, and burgundy in the fall. Rounding out the garden is fountain grass, Russian sage, and the recent addition of silver mound, a low-growing plant that zigzags along the front in some areas.

One of the couple’s favorite additions to the pool area are two Natchez varieties of crape myrtles. While not native, these proved to be a showstopper, with their smooth, dark, cinnamon-colored exfoliating bark. Pure-white flowers bloom all summer, and, in the fall, the leaves turn a vibrant orange-red. 

Landscaping continues to be an organic process. Over the course of the last several years, the couple discovered some plants worked on the property and some did not. And this year, the couple reengaged with Gordon to add more hydrangeas, Russian sage, dwarf fountain grass, and other plantings at the rear of the pool area, where there are a couple of scrub oaks that were there originally. 

In the end, the Deresiewiczes said they could not be happier with their piece of the rock. “If you want your property to look like it was born there and yet be beautiful, maybe more beautiful than what nature unguided gives you, that’s what this is.” 

THE TEAM

Landscape Architect: Dan Gordon Landscape Architects
Landscaping + Masonry: Landscope
Swimming Pool Contractor: Island Pools
Pergola Builder: Timothy McHugh Builders