Madoo: The Making of an American Garden by Alejandro Saralegui and Kendell Cronstrom (Timber Press, 2026)

Each month we choose a book connected to an artist, a place, or the wider world of American art history. Some are biographies. Some are field guides. Some are the very books that sat on an artist’s own desk. All of them are worth your time, and all of them will send you deeper into the stories these extraordinary places have to tell.

This month, we’re featuring Madoo: The Making of an American Garden. In the 1960s, painter, poet, and gardener Robert Dash began transforming a fallow farm field in Sagaponack into something that defied easy description: part studio, part sanctuary, part ongoing work of art. Over decades Madoo became a gathering place for some of the most important artists and poets of the 20th century, among them John Ashbery, Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, and James Schuyler. Sumptuously photographed by Tria Giovan and filled with Dash’s own paintings and drawings alongside archival material, this book is both a portrait of a place and a record of a creative life lived entirely on its own terms.