A Whimsical Seaside Garden

By NANCY KEATES

Nantucket, Mass.

A green chicken. Frogs playing banjo and guitar. A mermaid sitting in a chair.

Those are just a few of the unexpected elements found amid the flower-lined stone paths, archways and hedged-off hidden corners that surround Susan and Coleman Burke’s waterfront home. The chicken is a topiary; a gardener once cut off its head by mistake, but it has since grown back. The somewhat human-sized frogs at one end of a lawn are made of tin; when a sensor is tripped they play recordings of Mr. Burke, founder and managing partner of a commercial real-estate firm, performing songs like “Hello, Dolly.” Made of stone, the mermaid is propped on a chair under a trellis dripping with Concord grapes.

A green chicken. Frogs playing banjo and guitar. A mermaid sitting in a chair. Those are just a few of the unexpected elements that surround Susan and Coleman Burke’s waterfront home in Nantucket, Mass. Nancy Keates has details on Lunch Break.

“A good garden should always have a surprise—and you should have to walk to discover it,” said Ms. Burke, an avid gardener who sits on the board of the New York Botanical Garden. A golfer and pilot who is active in the New York society scene, Ms. Burke is known for her colorful sense of humor: She referred to her mermaid as “very porno.”

While the New York-based couple have extensive gardens at their other homes in Bedford, N.Y., Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Jupiter Island, Fla., their half-acre Nantucket plot was recently added to the Archives of American Gardens at the Smithsonian, making it one of 7,000 U.S. gardens with features considered unusual or distinguished enough to be documented for historical reference. What makes this garden unusual is that it manages to look delicate while only including plants hardy enough to live next to the sea, said Julie Jordin of the Garden Design Company of Nantucket, who works with Ms. Burke.

Panoramic View

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Bob O’Connor for The Wall Street Journal

A panoramic view of this Nantucket garden. Click and drag to rotate the image.

With its formal, organized plan and stone walls, the Burkes’ garden could play a role in an English children’s novel. Flowers of different heights and shapes—butterfly bushes, lilies and upright clematis—sprout from bushes and shrubs that line paths. There are hidden nooks and crannies, some outlined with tall hedges, others tucked away around corners, and lots of art and ornaments, like wishing wells, stone fountains and sculptures.

Right in front of the porch is a sunken ditch about 80 feet long and 6 feet deep known historically as a “ha-ha,” a reference to the surprise generated by the ditch’s existence. When standing in the ha-ha, visitors can be surrounded by flowers and plants; at the same time, the garden can be seen from the white rocking chairs on the porch without blocking the view of the ocean. The colors are green, pink, white, black and purple (orange and yellow were omitted, Ms. Burke said, because they aren’t colors of the sea).

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Bob O’Connor for The Wall Street Journal

The garden is the main attraction at the Burkes’ annual July cocktail party. But when the couple first bought their 13-acre waterfront property for $825,000 in 1992, it was mostly marshland. In 1994, they finished a 3,700-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bathroom home designed by well-known architect Robert Venturi that cost about $700,000 to build. With its elongated shape, simple lines, weathered wood shingles and understated materials, the house is sited so that the ocean is visible through almost every window in almost every room. Mr. Burke gets to town in a Boston Whaler he keeps off the shore at the bottom of their wooden stairs.

The couple’s house is in Shimmo, an area with large lots that sit along the Nantucket Harbor and have views of Brant Point Lighthouse and the ferries passing by. A six-bedroom, five-bathroom house on 5.2 acres also in Shimmo is on sale for $9 million.

Although Mr. Venturi built them the house they’d asked for, he didn’t include a plan for a garden. Ms. Burke called her friend George Schoellkopf, who created the Hollister House Garden in Washington, Conn., a project of the Garden Conservancy. When he arrived in Nantucket, the pair drank a couple of bottles of wine and stayed up talking about gardens until 2 a.m. The next morning, Mr. Schoellkopf emerged from his bedroom with a single piece of paper with three lines and a few irregular circles—the essential structure for what emerged.

Unlike the house, which rarely changes, the garden goes through a transformation every summer. Ms. Burke is always adding new plantings, changing things around—plants die or are eaten by rabbits. That constant evolution makes it hard to come up with a figure for how much her garden cost. But gardens can range from a starting capital expenditure of $10,000 to $100,000, depending on the size, and monthly maintenance can cost thousands of dollars, said garden experts on Nantucket. Ms. Burke also has plans for a vegetable garden in front.

“Every year, as I was able to convince [my husband] that it was absolutely necessary, I’d add something,” she said. “I always thought that dress allowances were expensive until we got into gardens,” joked Mr. Burke, an avid boater and gardener.

Ms. Burke speaks often of her nemeses: rabbits. She has a list of what she calls “rabbit tragedies,” including the murder of a treasured black hollyhock. She recently saw rabbits on her porch, which made her very upset. “Soon I am going to find them sitting on the furniture, enjoying the view.”

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com