A Long Island Garden with a Pagoda Chicken Coop and Salvaged Greenhouse

Interior designer Dean Yoder and his husband Jonathan Grimm bought this 1910 Dutch colonial largely for the land, and over 15 years they've built the gardens they always dreamed of — almost entirely with their own hands. When they arrived there was no garden space to speak of, just dying trees and a horrible 1950s cinder block garage sitting inexplicably in the middle of the backyard.

They attacked it themselves with sledgehammers, block by block, battling a wasp infestation with fire along the way. Where it stood, they rented a backhoe, dug out the footing and laid the blocks for the fountain that anchors the space today, now framed by a clematis in full bloom. The Asian garden is a deliberately loose term — neither Chinese nor Japanese, just their own interpretation. Its centerpiece is the oldest tree on the property, a boulevard cypress planted when the house was built, pruned every year into the layered shapes gardeners call clouds.

Nearby stands a pagoda-style structure they built for their chickens after learning that chickens originated in the Far East; the birds themselves lived into their twenties before passing during Covid. The pagoda's moon gate window came from Chinatown, and they converted it into a Dutch door.