Volunteers work to restore gardens at Sagtikos Manor in Bay Shore

For Celeste Topazio, it all started with the peonies.

The year was 2007. The red brick-walled garden at Sagtikos Manor in Bay Shore housed little but weeds, a far cry from the splendor commissioned by the manor’s owners in the 1930s.

The peacock fountain at the garden’s center, crafted by Bay Shore artist Mary Aldrich Fraser in cast bronze, was broken. The four towering juniper trees cornering the fountain, the pea-gravel paths and peony runs, rosebushes and a vegetable garden — all were long gone.

But Topazio, 73, of Brightwaters, who has been a trustee with the Sagtikos Manor Historical Society since 2006 and is now first vice president of the society, knew there were still three original peonies in the garden — she said she discovered them shortly before the weeds in the garden were mowed.

And she knew that peonies can be propagated, meaning, if done correctly, a single plant can be divided to create multiple new plants.

So in 2007, inspired by a lecture on historic landscaping, she rolled up her sleeves and went to work.

“I had a lot of homework. I contacted peony societies, landscape architects, the whole nine yards. But it’s been a labor of love,” said Topazio, who became a Cornell Cooperative Extension master gardener after starting the endeavor.

It took six years, but, said Topazio, she and her fellow gardeners recreated the original peony runs — approximately 200 feet of peonies, totaling about 80 plants, lining the restored paths. And all were propagated from the parent peonies planted in the original garden.

Ten years on, they’re not done yet. While their efforts may have started with the peonies, Friends of the Manor Gardens — a volunteer group founded by Topazio — has used archival evidence to revive other areas of the garden, and the volunteers are considering further additions, like restoring the original vegetable plots.

“I always said Sagtikos had a dual personality — the wow and the plow. It was a working farm, but it had beautiful gardens,” Topazio said.

Considering the garden had fallen into such disrepair, Alicia Whitaker, vice president of the Westhampton Garden Club and a Cornell master gardener, said propagating original plants from the walled garden on the Sagtikos estate, such as the peonies, is “really unusual and really lucky.”

“I think most people doing restorations can’t do that,” she said. “They have to do all kinds of forensic investigation. . . . If they have written records or old photos, that helps.”

Liz Flynn, 76, of Kings Park, is a master gardener who said she has been involved with the restoration efforts for 13 years.

“I’ve been gardening half my life, and to see such change, to see such improvement, it’s very satisfying,” she said.

Sagtikos Manor history

In 1692, Stephanus Van Cortlandt — the first mayor of New York City to be born in the state, which was a British colony at the time — purchased the 1,200 acres that made up the original Sagtikos Manor estate from the Secatogue tribe.

Van Cortlandt died in 1700, and Timothy Carll, who was part of a prominent Long Island family from the Huntington area, purchased it in 1706. The estate then passed hands again in 1758 to Jonathan Thompson, of Setauket, who purchased it for his son, Isaac, according to an official history of the property.

Isaac Thompson was a member of the Islip Town government and the New York State Assembly. His wife, Mary Gardiner, of East Hampton, was part of another wealthy family with deep roots on Long Island and, notably, were owners of Gardiners Island, situated between the North and South Forks.  

During the Revolutionary War, local historian Beverly C. Tyler writes, the Thompson family was involved in Patriot efforts and had connections to members of the Culper Spy Ring, a network based on Long Island that played a crucial role in winning the war.

The manor, meanwhile, served as a base for British soldiers and officers, including Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, during the British occupation of the Island. After the war, the manor hosted George Washington for a night in 1790 as he toured Long Island during his presidency, according to the manor history.

Sagtikos Manor later became a summer home for the descendants of Isaac Thompson and Mary Gardiner, until their great-grandson Frederick Diodoti Thompson bought out the other heirs in 1894 to become the sole owner. The last family member to live at the estate was Robert David Lion Gardiner, who inherited Sagtikos Manor in 1935 from his aunt, Sarah Gardiner, who commissioned the garden’s fountain and, possibly, the garden itself, according to Topazio.

In 1985, the property was deeded to the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation. A group was formed in 1964 to provide tours of the estate, and in 1976, the manor was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 2002, Suffolk County purchased the manor and the surrounding 10 acres to prevent its sale to a developer. The land is next to Gardiner County Park, a 230-acre tract that was also part of the original estate.

More than just peonies

Since forming in 2007, the Friends of the Manor Gardens has grown from four to around 24 volunteers. In addition to recreating the peony runs, they have incorporated an herb garden into the formal design, based on archival drawings and landscape plans that were never implemented, Topazio said.

The volunteers have also reinstated two rows of grapevines with the same grape varieties that would have been planted there in the 1930s, plus a few extra varieties that were not native to the estate. At least one vine from the original rows still remains in the garden, Topazio said.

“If we can propagate an original plant, we will do it. If not, we will replace the plant . . . with a plant in that family, like a hybrid per se, that will be more environmentally friendly,” she added.

The gardeners have replaced the junipers, although with a smaller variety to keep the roots from impacting the peacock fountain. An original rosebush, which still stands along the wall, was used to propagate another bush nearby — an experiment, said Topazio, by one of the master gardeners that so far has been successful.

“We’re going to see how that fares,” Topazio said. “Maybe down the road . . . we hope to have something representing the roses of this property because [the manor owners] loved roses, they were all over the place.”

The volunteer group hopes to plant more of the garden’s original rose varieties, she said, along with other flowers that would have been grown around the estate near the brick wall, Topazio said.

Peonies as fundraisers

The group is sustained by donations and fundraising initiatives like a June walking tour of the garden, after which they sell Sagtikos peonies — one per household — propagated from a parent plant that has been growing on the estate for nearly a century, Topazio said.

Efforts to restore historic gardens, like the initiative at Sagtikos Manor, help provide “context for the house,” said Whitaker, who recently helped plant a historic pollinator garden on the south side of the Tuthill House Museum in Westhampton Beach.

“What many historical societies are trying to do is show a picture of what life was like at a specific point in time,” she said. “It’s really important that the garden helps to tell a story about the whole property.”

She added, “By using period-specific plants, you can really get a better sense of, what was going on at that time? What was available to people? What was important, how do they design things?”

Maura Brush, director of horticulture at Old Westbury Gardens, described the exhaustive efforts that typically go into piecing together archival evidence to create a picture of “how the landscape has evolved, all of the little things that have happened between when the garden was planted and the modern day.”

“The idea is always that you’re preserving the entire landscape and not any individual plant within that landscape,” she said. “So, for instance, if you have a huge mature tree that’s in good health, you want to do everything you can to keep it in good health. But if you have a tree that’s declining . . . the idea is that it’s better to actually remove and replant that tree so that you can start building that landscape, the next generation of that tree, so that the landscape vision stays the same. Overall . . . you’re trying to balance the protection of the historical landscape and the practical considerations of maintaining and using it in the present day.”

Perennial volunteers

Volunteers dividing peonies for propagation at Sagtikos Manor in mid-October cited positive group dynamics and the satisfaction of a job well done as some reasons many have returned year after year to keep the garden going.

Flynn, the master gardener who has been volunteering at the estate for 13 years, maintains the six water lilies growing in the fountain — the same number recorded in the manor’s archives.

Flynn said she met Topazio and became involved in restoration efforts through the Cornell master gardener program.

Topazio “mentioned that she needed help, she was trying to restore the garden. [I said,] ‘Oh, that sounds like it’s right up my alley.’ I’ve been here since,” she said. “I’ve been gardening half my life, and to see such change, to see such improvement, it’s very satisfying.”

John Sanchez, 60, of Bay Shore, volunteers with his wife, who has been involved for five or six years. She persuaded him to join this year, he said.

“It’s something that we enjoy doing together. . . . Now that winter’s coming up, we’re going to be a little bored,” who noted that he started gardening during the pandemic and has Sagtikos peonies in his home garden.

Bob Reith, 69, of Bay Shore, said he has been gardening for more than 50 years and joined the restoration efforts about six years ago after participating in a peony tour.

“We’ve done a lot of work, a lot of plantings. We’ve updated all the perennials in the corner beds. We’ve been expanding, putting in more plants, starting on the walls,” he said.

The camaraderie has kept him coming back, he added. “The master gardeners are here, so when I have a common problem, I can discuss it with them and find out what they’d do.”

Ray Bell, 77, of West Islip, said he has been involved with the walled garden restoration since the beginning. The former nursery owner and past president of the Long Island Nursery & Landscape Association has been able to draw on a lifetime of horticultural experience to offer guidance on efforts at the garden.

For him, Topazio’s “love for the garden as an art” is one of the reasons he’s stuck with the group for so long.

“It took like an orchestra of different players to get that thing moving,” he said of the garden’s restoration. “Celeste has that ability to keep everybody in the fold.”

By Brianne Ledda

brianne.ledda@newsday.com@brianne_ledda

Brianne Ledda covers the Town of Islip for Newsday. She previously covered Southold and Greenport for The Suffolk Times and is a graduate of Stony Brook University.