Landscaping in Sagaponack, NY

Hedges here are cut under a Village rule of their own: section 30-9I keeps a landscaper's gas-powered hedge trimmer to set weekday hours and a short Saturday window, so our privet hedge trimming is booked on weekdays. The hedge itself follows Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County: California privet set as small plants about 18 inches apart in properly prepared soil, cut back by half at planting, then sheared so the base stays slightly wider than the top and light reaches the lower branches. A leggy hedge can be renewed, the New York Botanical Garden says, by cutting the branches to 4 to 6 inches from the ground in late March. We never plant border privet, which New York prohibits under 6 NYCRR Part 575, and Rutgers rates privet B for deer, seldom severely damaged.

The Village lighting chapter, Chapter 119, sets limits the Town of Southampton's code does not. Light sources may sit no higher than 60 vertical inches, with listed exceptions (section 119-5B(2)), and all exterior lighting on a property together may not exceed 500 watts or 6,500 lumens per acre (section 119-5B(5)). Lamps rated above 3000 Kelvin are prohibited (section 119-7H(4)), fixtures may not be placed in or aimed at the public right-of-way, waterways or public beaches (section 119-5B(1)), and the lighting of tennis, basketball and handball courts and sports fields is prohibited outright. Our landscape lighting designs for Sagaponack start from the per-acre total, then set each low, warm fixture to fit inside it.

Fences follow the Village zoning chapter, section 245-49. A fence or wall in a required front yard may be no taller than four feet; within 20 feet of a side or rear lot line the limit is six feet; nothing may exceed six feet except a tennis court enclosure, at eight; and fences of four feet or less are exempt from the building permit. On a corner lot, nothing in the sight triangle may rise above two feet, although trees limbed up at least 10 feet above the curb are allowed. Residential driveway gates and gateposts are prohibited on Sagg Main Street south of Montauk Highway and on parts of Hedges, Personage, Gibson, Daniels and Bridge Lanes and Sagaponack Road inside the Sagaponack Historic District, and every fence shows its finished side to the neighbor. Where no deer fence is wanted, we choose native and deer-resistant plants from the Rutgers A and B lists.

Sagg Pond meets the ocean through the Sagaponack Cut, an intermittent channel at the pond's south end that the Town Trustees manage for periodic flushing, to rid the pond of contaminants and favor shellfish and wetland life. The Town of Southampton describes the inlet as lying near 25 acres of dunes, a nesting ground for shorebirds and a significant Coastal Fish and Wildlife Habitat. On lots near the pond or the ocean we plant for salt spray and wind from the CCE Suffolk list, favoring bayberry, bearberry and pitch pine, all rated A by Rutgers, and inkberry, rated B. The Suffolk County Hazard Mitigation Plan's Sagaponack annex holds no flood profile, because the Village did not take part in the update, so we read flood exposure from your survey and the Village's own chapters.

The USDA's 2023 map puts the 11962 ZIP code in zone 7b, the half zone whose average yearly low falls between 5 and 10 degrees F, and the Village's history page calls Sagaponack a 1653 area, 100 miles east of the mainland, bordering the broad Atlantic. Madoo, the horticulturally diverse garden the Madoo Conservancy keeps in the village, was established in 1967. Construction runs on its own clock under section 30-9H: none on Sundays all year, none after 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays from May 15 to September 15, and none on the holidays the section lists, from New Year's Day to Christmas. We schedule a patio, wall or planting build inside those hours, and keep gas tools inside the narrower blower and trimmer windows.

See Sagaponack, NY on Google Maps — we cover the whole area from Southampton.