SPRING OASIS
by Charlie Finch



Those looking for a tranquil respite from the art-market hurly-burly should consider the Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden at 28 Deveau Road in North Salem, N.Y., which reopens on Apr. 14, 2007. About an hour’s drive from Manhattan, this deliciously eccentric cultural reservoir was founded by the curator and set designer Natalie Hays Hammond in 1957 with money inherited from her father, a mining engineer who discovered King Solomon’s Mines in southern Africa, immortalized by the novelist H. Rider Haggard.

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