The art of making garden furniture

Want to create outdoor rooms in your garden? In Sakonnet, a magical landscape on the Rhode Island coast, you can learn from the masters.

This is the key question in creating any garden: how do you get all the plants you can't resist and the ideas emphatically flooding your imagination to coalesce on a common ground? booking three days a week in season, have been puzzled by this for decades - one walk, hedge or unusual plant at a time.

The Creativity Points of John Gwynne and Mikel Folcarelli reference are very varied. The defined pieces of traditional English gardens are an influence in the Little Compton garden. The same goes for the color field theory of pioneering modernist artist Josef Albers, whose bold pigment squares have been intensified against the backdrop of carefully chosen adjacent squares.

Memories of business trips to the Amazon is also part of the Sakonnet. And so are those of domestic trips - in particular, Mr. Gwynne and Mr. Folcarelli's four- to six-hour car journeys to New York every weekend during the nearly 30 years they resided part-time in Sakonnet , where they now live full-time.

Before that, Mr. Gwynne knew the land as his family's second home. Some fond memories include working alongside her sister to clear the planting spaces from the dark thicket of overgrown autumn olive trees, multifloral roses and oriental bittersweet, linking these spaces with narrow tunnels carved into the undergrowth.

Such raw, connected openings were the first hint of what Sakonnet was to become.

ImageA moss-lined room begins the journey through Sakonnet Garden, in Little Compton, R.I., with sculptural rhododendron trunks adding to the atmosphere from another world.Credit...Brian Reyes