About Bridgehampton Gardens

Bridgehampton Gardens does one thing for the South Fork of Long Island, Southampton to Montauk: when a property needs a landscape professional, of either kind, we find the right one and put the two of you in touch.

Two sides, one first question

A landscape master plan and a Tuesday afternoon of weeding are both "landscaping," and they are almost nothing alike. One is a design problem, sketched out over weeks and, sometimes, stamped by a licensed professional if the scope calls for it. The other is a standing weekly relationship with a crew who knows your beds, your irrigation zones and your deer pressure. We ask which one you need on the very first question of our intake form, and everything downstream, who we call, what we tell them, follows from the answer. If you are not sure yet, that is one of the options too.

Landscape architect, or landscape designer — the difference is legal, not marketing

New York State licenses the title "landscape architect" under Education Law Article 148. Earning it takes a combined education-and-experience score of at least 12 units and passing the LARE exam. It does not mean everyone who designs a garden needs one: "landscape designer," "landscape gardener," "contractor" and "arborist" are all legal, unlicensed titles under the same law, and most residential planting design in the Hamptons is done, entirely legally, by people who hold one of those instead. The two towns we checked disagree about when the license actually matters for paperwork: East Hampton Town's own site-plan instructions never name a landscape architect as an acceptable sealer of anything; Southampton Town's application form names one explicitly, alongside an architect, engineer or land surveyor. We tell you which situation you're in before we send anyone.

About the name

Bridgehampton is also home to Bridge Gardens, a public five-acre botanical garden at 36 Mitchell Lane run by the nonprofit Peconic Land Trust, open daily with free admission. Bridgehampton Gardens is a separate, unrelated referral business. We are not connected to Bridge Gardens, we do not run a public garden, and nothing on this site should be read as theirs.

What we look for in a pro

On the design side: a track record we can see, and a straight answer about whether a job needs a State-licensed landscape architect or is better suited to a designer or contractor. On the care side: current, appropriate licensing, insurance, local references, and a crew that actually works your town every week rather than passing through once a season. Deer fencing and deer-resistant planting sit across both sides on purpose; who we send you to depends on whether the job is mostly a permit-and-design problem or mostly an ongoing-care one.

What it costs you

Nothing. Participating professionals pay us a referral fee for the introduction; you pay them for the work, on their proposal or quote.

On the numbers you will read here

Landscape pricing is unusually hard to pin down: fee percentages range from 5% to 20% of a project's cost depending on who you ask, and not one Hamptons design-build firm we checked, including ones headquartered in Bridgehampton itself, publishes a number anywhere on its own site. We print the honest range instead of a fake middle, say when a figure is national rather than local, and where we could not find a trustworthy number at all, a gap in our own published research, we say that instead of guessing.

Who we are

Bridgehampton Gardens launched in 2026 and is run from the East End. We are new and small. If something here is wrong or out of date, email us and we will fix it.