Diane B

About Dianne Dianne B.

May 2009

Dianne B has always stood for style and this web site is her latest endeavor. From all the gardening accoutrements that she has ever used (and there have been plenty) she has whittled them down to these --- her tried and true favorites. She is particularly proud of the Tool Belt and the Yard Bag, which she has had made exclusively for this special garden shopping experience.

Dianne's passion for gardening began more than twenty years ago when she acquired her first house in East Hampton. What started as a weedy, woody tangle was turned into a garden-tour-worthy shady exotic acre in her own inimitable way. The details were documented in DIRT: The Lowdown on Growing a Garden with Style, a book that has become a gardening cult classic. Dianne writes about gardening and lifestyle and is the highly-irreverent, though immensely helpful Garden Pundit for Hamptons Cottages and Gardens Magazine. Her unique artistic gardening vision, as well as her dramatic decorating style, has been editorialized countless times.

In her cultural pursuits, Dianne is Co-President of LongHouse Reserve, an internationally-renowned 16-acre sculpture garden, learning center and arboretum in East Hampton, NY, as well as a Founding Member of the Board of Robert Wilson’s arts foundation, The Watermill Center. She invests her enthusiasm in several other local organizations as well.

Style has infused her entire career. As the owner of the avant-garde Dianne B. stores and the first Comme des Garcons USA (four in all), she was a pioneer of those now-ubiquitous architectural spaces on Madison Avenue and in SoHo and was the first to import such big names designers as Issey Miyake and Jean Paul Gaultier, while simultaneously designing her own collection. A Sunday spread in the New York Times Magazine with photographs by Duane Michaels was the first of her high-profile collaborations with artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman and Peter Hujar.

Dianne's many personal interests include travel (she tries to add two new countries each year), indulging her beautiful black Cavalier spaniel, Flora Pandora, creating made-by-hand dioramas and challenging herself to master botanical Latin. Dianne has a pied-a-terre on Beekman Place in Manhattan (like Auntie Mame) but lives primarily in East Hampton on a new and very different acre with her partner, a teenage daughter and an ever-evolving garden.