What could be better than the chance to combine a little art history with a visit to some of the most beautiful private gardens in the Hamptons? This weekend, the Parrish Art Museum will hold its annual “Landscape Pleasures” symposium and garden tour. The theme of the lectures is garden and landscape photography, and the speakers include the photographers Joel Meyerowitz and Erica Lennard, and Leslie Rose Close, a landscape historian and the wife of the painter Chuck Close.

“Landscape Pleasures,” which is a fund-raiser for the museum (tickets are $125 for museum members and $175 for non-members), is in its 25th year. The director of the Parrish, Trudy Kramer, said that the idea grew out of a series of exhibitions the museum did about the Hamptons at the turn of the 20th century, including one called “Fauns and Fountains,” about garden statuary. Several individuals in the community who were interested in landscape architecture and the history of landscape architecture decided to organize a combination lecture series and garden tour, which became “Landscape Pleasures.” It has become a “very healthy fund-raiser for the museum,” Ms. Kramer said, raising about $85,000 annually. “The overhead is very low,” she said. “We have donations of travel [for the speakers], and people donate cocktail parties and garden tours. We tried to keep the prices low, too.”

The Parrish, which holds a major gala every year in July, is currently raising money for a 64,000-square-foot expansion designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, which will be built on a 14-acre property in Water Mill. The budget is estimated at between $55 million and $60 million. Ms. Kramer said the museum currently has a site application into the Southampton Town Planning Board, which she said she hoped would be approved by the fall. The new museum is slated to open in 2009.

On Saturday, Mr. Meyerowitz, Ms. Lennard, and Ms. Close, among others, will give lectures at the museum’s current location in the village of Southampton. Mr. Meyerowitz will talk about his project to photograph 40 New York City parks for the Department of Parks & Recreation. Ms. Lennard will talk about her 25-year career of garden photography, and Ms. Close will offer a brief history of garden photography, including particularly the work of Mattie Edwards Hewitt.

Hewitt took beautiful photographs of Grey Gardens — the East Hampton estate famous as the decaying mansion of “Big” and “Little” Edie Beale, and now owned by Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee. When Hewitt photographed Grey Gardens in early 1920s, it still belonged to its original owners, the Hills, and its walled garden was located right on the dunes. Anna Gilman Hill, who was the author of a book called “Forty Years of Gardening,” worked closely with her landscape architect, Ruth Dean, to design the garden.

Grey Gardens “was derivative of English gardens of the time, like Vita Sackville-West’s and Gertrude Jekyll’s,” Ms. Close said. “Very heavily planted and beautiful vines.”

Ms. Lennard, who started photographing gardens while living in Paris, has published around two dozen lavish coffee table books, including “Artists’ Gardens,” “Gardens by the Sea,” and “Secret Gardens of Hollywood.” Outside of books, though, she prefers photographing in black and white — partly because the photographers and filmmakers she is inspired by worked in black and white, and also because her early work was photographing the formal gardens of Le Nôtre. “It was much more about the form and the contrast and the darks and lights,” she explained. “All of the classic gardens, whether they’re French Formal or English Romantic, have architectural or pictorial references that really work in black and white.”

Previous years’ themes, which have included water, roses, food, and scent in the garden have dictated the choice of gardens to visit more than this year’s. The seven gardens on Sunday’s tour represent a wide range, from a garden in Bridgehampton divided into formal “rooms” to one in Sagaponack that is designed more naturalistically, with perennial beds and a field of wildflowers.

A landscape architect based in Southampton, Perry Guillot, will introduce the gardens on the tour. In his own designs, Mr. Guillot said, he is a minimalist. “I often begin a project by setting a goal that there be no more than five species of plants introduced into the landscape,” he said. “I do very unstructured, very green gardens that fall short in the blossom category.” His is not the dominant style in the Hamptons, which he characterized as both more opulent and more sculpted.

But whatever their style, landscape designers are much in demand in the Hamptons these days. “It always follows the financial market,” Mr. Guillot said. “Right now, there’s enough business for everybody, times two.”

Tickets for “Landscape Pleasures,” June 9 and 10 at the Parrish Art Museum at 25 Job’s Lane in Southampton, can be purchased online at www.parrishart.org, or by calling 631-283-2118, ext. 41.