Landscaping in Westhampton Beach, NY

Leaf blowers follow the Village's rule, not the Town's. Village Code section 110-9.1, added in 2007, prohibits gasoline-engine-powered leaf blowers on Sundays, and section 110-5 excludes gas blowers from the noise chapter's definition of homeowner's light residential outdoor equipment. The Town of Southampton's May 20 through September 20 gas blower ban applies to the unincorporated parts of the Town, which the village is not, and the Village of Southampton's year-round ban stops at that village's line. We do leaf removal in Westhampton Beach Monday through Saturday and keep gas blowers off properties here on Sundays. For construction work, Village Code section 110-3E allows 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays and 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, with no Sunday work in July and August.

Trees and berms go to the Planning Board. Village Code Chapter 170 treats as a tree any living woody plant more than three inches in caliper, the trunk's diameter, measured three feet above natural ground, and on a parcel larger than 1/2 acre no tree may be removed without a permit (section 170-3). The Planning Board administers the chapter and can order restoration. Chapter 66 governs berms, which it defines as earthen structures for defense, security, enclosure or screening: no berm may stand higher than four feet (section 66-9A), side slopes may be no steeper than one to three, and the crest no wider than four feet. A berm must be vegetated and landscaped as the Planning Board approves before its topsoil erodes, and the application carries a grading plan, a cross-section and a detailed landscaping plan. Our landscape design drawings carry that planting plan with the grading.

Lighting runs later here than in the Town's hamlets. The Village's residential lighting standards, added to its zoning chapter in 2018, require outdoor fixtures to be fully shielded and aimed straight downward, with listed low-output exceptions (section 197-25.5B), and bar nonessential outdoor lighting from staying on continuously from midnight until dawn (section 197-25.5E). The Town of Southampton's curfew starts at 10:00 p.m. The Village also prohibits lamps above 3,000 kelvin and any lighting that outlines all or part of a building, such as a window, roof or gable (section 197-25.3B). We specify warm lamps of 3,000 K or less, aim path lights down onto the walk and set landscape lighting timers to switch off by midnight.

Water and wind shape the planting. The County's hazard mitigation plan says the southern third of the village, near the bays and including Dune Road, is vulnerable to flooding, about 1 square mile of the village's 3, and names the Village's Building and Zoning Administrator as its floodplain administrator. Near a tidal wetland, New York State's adjacent-area rule reaches up to 300 feet inland, and DEC requires a permit for almost any work that alters it. Salt carried on onshore breezes, fog and wind can injure sensitive plants, Cornell Cooperative Extension notes, so near the water we also plant for salt spray. Its salt-spray list for eastern Long Island includes bayberry, beach plum, inkberry, pitch pine and eastern red cedar, all natives, and Rutgers rates bayberry and pitch pine A, rarely damaged by deer browse, and inkberry B, seldom severely damaged. Rutgers also says no plant is deer proof. Where dune planting is allowed, American beachgrass goes in as dormant bare-root stems, called culms, from October 15 to April 1, set 12 to 24 inches apart under the USDA's Mid-Atlantic guidance.

Westhampton Beach is in USDA hardiness zone 7a (ZIP 11978, 2023 map), an average annual extreme winter low of 0 to 5 degrees F. NOAA's 1991-2020 normals for the Westhampton Gabreski Airport station put the median last spring freeze at May 7 and the first fall freeze at October 14, a season of 160 days, against April 23, October 24 and 182 days at Bridgehampton; the station averages 43.46 inches of precipitation a year. Long Island's Plymouth soils, which NRCS describes as excessively drained sands, are of large extent, and the Web Soil Survey shows which series lies under a given lot. On sand, Suffolk County's Healthy Lawns guidance favors smaller, more frequent waterings, about 1 inch a week for most lawns; on SCWA service that means odd/even days and nothing from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. We set irrigation systems to that schedule on smart controllers with rain sensors, and we finish fertilizing before November 1, as Suffolk County's Chapter 459 requires.

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