To achieve that perfect green lawn, well-heeled Hamptons homeowners are going to extreme lengths to ensure their grass is literally always greener.
“I was at a friend’s house for a tour since we use the same landscaper and he said, ‘Take a guess how much my lawn costs to look like this,’” an East Hampton resident who asked not to be named told Vanity Fair. “I said, ‘$300,000,’ thinking it was ridiculous. He said, ‘Keep going.’” Turns out the vast gardens and sprawling lawns at that Southampton estate cost a whopping $500,000 a year to maintain. “It looks like it’s out of a movie, but it has to,” the local explained. “He has dignitaries and celebrities and musicians and designers staying with him. He doesn’t have a choice. It’s a showcase.”
While not everyone has roses flown in from other countries, as the owner of that Southampton estate does, there’s no stopping some homeowners on their quest for impeccable grounds. Some people are using green spray paint for a quick solution to yellow spots often incurred from dog urine, while others are going as far as having water brought in by the truckload to keep things looking lush. On Shelter Island (located between the North and South Forks of Long Island), one private water company says that it has clients who spend “thousands of dollars a month” in the summer to have water trucked in to maintain their lawns, an expense usually reserved for filling a pool. And for those rich people who have really run out of things to spend their cash on, the latest indulgence for the lawn-obsessed is hiring someone to wash the bird shit off their grass (yes, regular standard-issue bird shit, not just goose shit, which in fairness can be cumbersome). A local landscape company employee who asked not to be named told Vanity Fair they have clients paying real money for this service: “It’s definitely a thing.”
But it’s the overwatering by a handful of superusers who use county water that presents a more serious problem. Summer has only just started, and Suffolk County, which is home to the Hamptons, is experiencing moderate drought conditions, one notch from severe, according to the US Drought Monitor, inching the entire region dangerously close to not being able to access water in an emergency.
If human nature is any indication, the urge to overwater will prevail. A survey by the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at Ohio State University revealed the pursuit of green grass is fueled by peer pressure, which in the Hamptons is the driving force behind everything from fashion and tablescaping to face-lifts and vegetable gardens. One-upping the neighbors is practically the town sport.
“All the boys talk about in the Hamptons is the grass,” says Sara Adams. She and her green-lawn-obsessed partner, David Hart, are co-owners of the restaurants K Pasa and Kumiso. “I listen to it all the time. It’s like a macho-testosterone-penis thing,” she said. “They sit down to dinner and the first thing they say is ‘How’s your grass looking?’ I swear.”
Author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, Ted Steinberg blames the obsession on the fertilizer industry’s marketing. “Many people have high expectations for the lawn and those standards are no accident,” he said. “They derive from the chemical lawn care industry, which has spent gazillions cultivating the green dream.”
But a pristine green lawn is no longer the status symbol many wealthy Hamptonites think it is. “If you have a massive toxic green lawn, you look like a smoker,” said Edwina von Gal, founder and chair of the nonprofit the Perfect Earth Project. She said that if everyone simply had the right plants in place for their soil, “moderate droughts wouldn’t be an issue.” Von Gal would know; in addition to her nonprofit, she is a landscape designer. She’s transformed the properties of Calvin Klein, Robert De Niro, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and others interested in modifying their estates into more earth-friendly, chemical-free, but still, as she describes,“beautiful” properties.
This year, the Suffolk County Water Authority has created a policy (albeit unenforceable as it has yet to be codified by the various towns and villages that make up the Hamptons) asking all homeowners to water their lawns every other day. Officials at the authority hope the effort will prevent the potentially aquifer-draining watering habits of just a handful of superusers. Preventing an irreversible salt water breach to the freshwater supply is the goal, as well as ensuring there’s enough water for an emergency.
Last year, dozens of people in East Hampton and Southampton, along with drought conditions, helped trigger a stage one water emergency for the East End in August, which was extended in September to the entire service area, from the Nassau/Suffolk border to Montauk. The list of the top 15 guzzlers of 2022 reads like a who’s who of finance and entertainment. According to a FOIL request (which allows the public to request records from New York state or local government agencies in New York) the list includes Loews Hotels’ Jon Tisch; Joann Goldsman, wife of filmmaker Akiva Goldsman; and real estate mogul Robert Taubman, among others (Tisch, Joann Goldsman, and Taubman did not immediately return Vanity Fair’s requests for comment). The number one water hog of 2022 was an estate owned by a company called Ickenham Limited on Meadow Lane in Southampton. It used 14,357,710 gallons of water—potentially for uses from irrigation and domestic use to geothermal heating and cooling. According to the SCWA, that much water would cost in the $43,500 range.
The obsession with keeping up with the Tischs is understandable, according to one property manager who asked not to be named. He said his clients want their grass to look good. “They are demanding and ask, ‘Why is my lawn not green?’ They get really stressed about it.” He said it’s hard to tell someone who just dropped $100,000 on sod, plus the thousands they spend on lawn care, that they can’t water. But rich or not, everyone in the Hamptons is in it together because there’s just one source of water. “We’re all tapping one big aquifer. You can’t rebuy water.”
It remains to be seen if the new policy will have an impact. Last year, the emergency status was disregarded by many, and the Hamptons could again be at risk of running short of a resource that should be in ample supply.
“The difference between Long Island and other areas of the United States is that we have water—trillions of gallons of water in the aquifer that should last lifetime after lifetime,” said Jeff Szabo,CEO of Suffolk County Water Authority. “We have the infrastructure to meet peak demand.” Peak demand being summer, when about 70% of the 70 billion annual gallons are used, according to Szabo.
Last year by mid-summer, when the Hamptons got very dry, the water authority started to notice some wells in East Hampton and Southampton drastically depleting between midnight and 7 a.m., according to Szabo. This left barely enough water for emergency services and fire fighters.
“Tanks were draining to dangerously low levels,” he explained, by just a handful of houses, with some using around 50 gallons per minute to irrigate their lawns. “We see that on the East End typically because [of] the larger estates and properties,” he added. “It’s unique because [the houses are] in a cluster. Even geographically, if you look at the houses, it doesn’t happen in other areas of Suffolk. It’s a small area—all draining the system. It’s significant.”
It’s not just overwatering that’s destroying the ecosystem. Fertilizer and pesticides are also to blame. In fact, Suffolk County tops the state in pesticide usage, according to a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation report. Tops by “a huge margin” said The East Hampton Star in a recent report.
Von Gal believes that the Hamptons represent a litmus test for everywhere else and hopes if she can convince people here to let go of the green, other regions may follow. “Out here, it’s just more. The issues show up faster and they’re more visible,” she said. She’s working to change lawn care habits. Overwatering can cause fungus, she said. Fungus causes a cycle that results in massive chemical use. It invites ticks and mosquitos, which then get sprayed, which kills all insects, which collapses the bird population. “Caterpillars,” von Gal said, “do more than arborists.” She said the correct way to avoid fungus is to water just twice a week for longer periods. “Imagine wearing a wet bathing suit all summer.”