“The magnolias were the first thing I planted,” Peter Schlesinger says of the garden in the 19th-century house just outside of Bellport, Long Island, that he and Eric Boman bought in 1981. “And I didn’t realize they would become trees!” The house itself “was a total wreck; I mean, it would have been torn down if we hadn’t bought it,” he says. Boman, who died in 2022, was an accomplished photographer (and, before that, an illustrator). Schlesinger, now a ceramicist, started out as a painter. Schlesinger and Boman bought this house after renting in Fire Island Pines for a couple of summers and deciding that owning there wasn’t for them. “We wanted a place we could go to all year round, and we wanted a garden and a nice house,” Schlesinger says.

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