Book excerpt: The Hamptons are known as a glamorous playground of the rich and famous, but since its earliest days as a sleepy summer colony, the area has also been at the epicenter of American garden design, boasting a vast collection of lushly innovative, private landscapes-and a staggering assemblage of creative gardeners, designers, and landscape architects. Hamptons Gardens invites you behind the private hedges and into the picturesque landscapes, showing work by groundbreaking designers such as Edwina von Gal, Oehme, van Sweden and Associates, and Miranda Brooks. From the sustainable and native to the over-the-top and avant garde, these gardens frame or transform houses-both modern and traditional-and extend the living space outdoors. Hamptons Gardens makes stops at the estates of Southampton, the cliffs of Montauk, East Hampton's Georgica Pond, and even the famed Grey Gardens. In collaboration with photographers Mary Ellen Bartley and Doug Young, author and Hamptons-insider Jack deLashmet open the garden gates to the Hamptons' most exciting private gardens in this visually stunning edition.