PAWLING, N.Y.

IT had been raining all day, so mist covered the trees and shrubs as we set out for a walk through Duncan and Julia Brine's six-acre garden, a dreamlike landscape that takes its cues from the old shade trees and fence posts remaining from the farm that was once here, as well as the native plants, like black locust and joe- pye weed, that populate the hills and spring-fed marsh.

The land is part of the old Sheffield Farm, which supplied 50,000 bottles of milk a day to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s (according to the enlargement of a vintage postcard in a little restaurant in town), and the Brines have made their home and of- f ice here, in two 1920s farmhouses at the apex of the property.

It takes exactly 27 steps for the Brines to commute from the renovated farmhouse they live in to the one where they run their business, Horti- cultural Design Inc., across a gravelly courtyard filled with exotic plants.

"It's all Asian, except for the elderberry," Mr. Brine said, as I stood nose to nose with an enormous cryptomeria, or Japanese cedar, outside the off ice door. "The idea was to have more exotic things close to the house, and in a deer-protected area."

The space is fenced with a combination of coarse oak planks and locust posts, as well as an occasional Japanese umbrella pine, which the deer do not eat (here, anyway).

Mr. Brine has broken every rule in the book by planting the cryptomeria right in front of the door. But this magnificent evergreen — a Yoshino, at least 15 feet tall and 6 feet wide — did not block my way. It was riveting, like an unbelievably handsome man, and caught me off guard. I forgot all my preconceived ideas about how to navigate this garden and simply started looking around.

There were callicarpas full of pale lavender berries, which would turn purple in the fall; viburnums and shrub dogwoods; and lacy elderberries juxtaposed against dense evergreens or the large, floppy leaves of an oakleaf hydrangea. There were specimen trees, like an English oak and sweet gum, both with variegated leaves, and mounding shrubs, like stephanandra, whose bright green, deeply incised leaves cascaded over black sedge grass.

"It's stuffed with stuff," Mr. Brine said, grinning at what he calls "an intentional arsenal of plants," all knitted together, hiding the walls of the house we had just left. Otherwise "we'd have this building looming over us," he said. "But as soon as you're out the door, you're in gaga land."

The couple met in New York in 1981 when Mr. Brine was on hiatus from a job as the art director of the "Faerie Tale Theater" television series, and from various film production jobs. Ms. Brine, a painter whose name was then Julia Allard, had planted a few tomatoes and herbs behind her Brook- lyn apartment, but Mr. Brine started planting an ebullient ornamental gar- den there, just so he could film it. As it turned out, "the process of making the garden was so fantastic," he said, "that I decided to be a landscape de- signer instead of a filmmaker." (Ms. Brine, who now manages the couple's design office, was doing large-scale acrylic paintings at the time and showing them at alternative art spaces like Fashion Moda in the Bronx and ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side; after she became immersed in the world of plants, though, she turned to botanical watercolors.)

Mr. Brine shapes a landscape as a filmmaker would a story, conceiving it as an unfolding narrative, he said, "only discovered by moving through space." With a cameraman's eye, he knows how to take the evocative long view of a wild black locust grove against the marsh, for example, as well as the close-up. He sees how one plant influences the shape or color of other in its proximity, with its shade or by leaning this way or that. And he wields his pruners accordingly.

"A lot of tunnels are starting to appear," he said, ducking under a rare variegated sweet gum, which had been limbed up — pruned to remove the lower branches — to allow a viburnum to bask in the light.

"That one is Viburnum wrightii," said Mr. Brine, who uses the plants' Latin names with easy familiarity. "If you want a red-berried viburnum, this is the one."

We were inside the architecture of the sweet gum, close to its deeply fissured bark, looking up its craggy branches and the undersides of its star-shaped leaves.

"You're not standing outside, as if there's some forbidden edge that you may not pass," he said.

I could have stayed there all afternoon, but Mr. Brine was disappearing down a narrow path where eight-foot-tall yellow silphiums and rudbeckias with lemony petals — Herbstonne, I later learned — were drooping from the rain. My arms brushed against their wet leaves as I followed the gardener under an arbor of Dutchman's pipe intertwined with purple elderberry and down a gravel path that soon narrowed. Bordered on either side by the bushy stephanandra that appears throughout this landscape, the path curved toward a group of serviceberries and weeping tea vibur- nums — V. setigerum — whose berries, Ms. Brine said, turn color in a sequence.

"They're sort of yellow and orange and finally this bright, bright red," added Ms. Brine, who has been painting them.

We were moving through what seemed like an ocean of plants. One grouping was devoted to all things yellow, including an Ogon Spirea (which has yellow leaves), a golden catalpa, a yellow smoketree and variegated yellow and green sedge grass. (The  immersion  in  yellow  was  far better, it seemed to me, than one garish golden cypress in a sea of green.) At the bottom of the slope, I turned to look back at the layered masses of plants tumbling down the hill.

"There's a lot of weeping stuff going on, a lot of cascading stuff," said Mr. Brine, who has a refreshingly casual, yet apt way of putting things. "The viburnums and the amalanchiers are the verticals."

We walked on through the heavy mist, letting the paths lead us through a landscape whose rural history is still palpable in the tall old horse chestnut, the great black walnuts and the sugar maple that once stretched their arms wide, shading cows in the pasture. Beneath the sugar maple's canopy, Mr. Brine had combined the heart- shaped leaves of upright wild ginger with Japanese bugbane and Kirengeshoma palmata, an open, lounging kind of shrub with yellow blossoms.

"I love plants that are eternally coming into bloom," he said. "Certain things are just kind of agonizingly slow." But he said it with pleasure, like a gardener giving in to anticipation, which is so much a part of horticulture.

I liked the hidden paths that invited me to walk into tall grasses, where blue-green larches grew among the ironweed and giant Chinese silver grass, and farther on, groves of young dawn redwoods and birches sprang out of the swampy ground. Here and there, plantings of tall purple eupatorium, joe-pye weed, framed the views across the marsh.

Mr. Brine calls it "structured naturalism." And it is, of course. But there is also drama at play here: The plants have been given unexpected roles, in unusual places, and the delight comes in seeing what they will do on this ever-changing stage.

Reprinted with Permission of The New York Times

Photo of Duncan and Julia Brine © John Lei