Although Martha knows there is no such thing as an instant rose garden, experience has taught her that structure is the catalyst. "With a really good plan and good architecture, you can make a garden happen," says Martha, who began planting her ambitious rose garden in her East Hampton weekend place in 1991. By the end of the first season, the climbing roses had scaled their supports, and within a few years, they had achieved a mature look. By comparison, it had taken 16 years for Martha's Westport property to reach the stage captured in "Martha Stewart's Gardening."

When Martha began working on the East Hampton garden, even the soil was beyond repair. The beds had to be excavated two feet deep and filled with a blend of topsoil, compost, and manure. But once the beds were done, Martha was ready to create the structure that would form the garden.

Martha's Garden Plan
Martha's accumulator personality and affinity for history strongly influenced the plans for her East Hampton rose garden. A turn-of-the-century photograph of the house prompted the idea of covering the facade with trellised roses in the style of an English cottage.

Inspiration for some of the other design components, such as the garden gates, came from Gertrude Jekyll's Garden Ornaments, which surveys the use of architectural elements in gardens. At an auction, another element surfaced in the form of a 19th-century tuteur (French for stake), a metal tower for training roses vertically. Using it as a model, Martha had a welder fashion a pair of iron replicas, each a graduated column balancing a globe, which now punctuate the garden.

Ultimately, the East Hampton garden bacome a synthesis of the best rose plantings Martha had seen: elements of Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island, certain English gardens, and a hint of Claude Monet's Giverny in France. The metal trellising inspired by Giverny is painted her signature green, suggesting a verdigris patina, and the cedar woodwork in the garden was stained to match.