It’s “red carpet season”—at least in the media. Every week, celebrities gather to watch and/or receive the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, People’s Choice or any of the thousand other awards that lead up to the Academy Awards. Many of us gawk from the comfort of our couches as red carpets roll out and celebrities … Read more
Italian writer Andrea di Robilant has long been a man in search of the past. He mined a rich vein of family history in Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, the 2008 biography of his ancestor Lucia Mocenigo, a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Venetian aristocrat and friend of the French … Read more
Great gardens have much in common with other works of art—form, color, structure, light, space and an indefinable “something” that draws viewers in. Unlike other masterpieces, however, gardens are ephemeral. Any gardener can tell you what happens when you leave a landscape untended for even a month. Lines blur, thuggish plants grow large while less … Read more
Back before the dawn of time and the omnipresence of e-Bay, you used to be able to find dusty little antique shops on side streets in towns and cities all over the country. Those shops were generally filled with equal measures of junk and treasure, though sometimes it seemed that little if any merchandise changed … Read more
I find lots of inspiration in the works of contemporary botanists, designers, gardeners and plant lovers, but I also comb through history for role models. A few weeks ago, Skylands, New Jersey’s official botanical garden, held its annual plant sale. This year’s sale included a used book table and I found my dose of inspiration … Read more
