The arborist said that taking down a tree is “all physics,” but to bystanders it looked like ballet. / Photo by Ann Geracimos.

I KILLED a tree recently and I’m not sorry. I killed the tree, an ailanthus, before it killed me, and I did it in tandem with another murder: my neighbor’s towering elm. We plotted together.

That’s not saying I didn’t mourn the act, carried out by hired hands. That I didn’t know such things are taboo. Trees, even invasive and sick ones, produce oxygen, give shade, store carbon. Urban inner-city trees, such as our two, are especially prized when they can stand up to compacted soil, pavement, pollution, human detritus and animal waste. Amazing so many manage to survive.

In theory, an owner here doesn’t need official permission to take one down on private property. The exception in Washington DC, my home, is a so-called heritage tree—old growths of great girth, 100 inches circumference or more—which generally are protected by law.

My big fat dirty ailanthus and my neighbor’s elm each measured 106.81 inches, baffling precision for a complex formula. His was a tree to cherish, spreading its canopy elegantly over our rooftops and halfway across the street. Alas, elms also are favored by a mean beetle that carries a damaging fungus, the so-called Dutch elm disease, named for the country where it was first identified.

The ailanthus, by contrast, is  recognized universally as an invasive scourge of little redeeming value except it is fast-growing and nearly indestructible. It sends out sprouts indiscriminately and often, even after being cut down. (It’s also known as the “tree of heaven”  because of its great reach upward. And, yes, the name was a metaphor for struggling immigrant life portrayed in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, title of a 1943 American novel and later a movie.)

My neighbor and I had paid a commercial firm dearly through the years to keep our trees alive—in theory. Who doesn’t want cooling shade under a hot summer sun?

Then came a spring storm that sent a supposedly healthy ailanthus limb crashing down onto my patio, mangling a newly bought wrought-iron chaise longue and just barely missing my house. An omen if ever there was one. I shuddered recalling the $20,000 estimate once given me as the cost of removal, primarily because of its location in a back yard with limited access to the street.

About the same time, my neighbor asked an “arborist consultant” (yes, such a thing exists) to advise him about the wisdom of continuing to feed nutrients to an elm that he thought showed some troublesome signs on its trunk. Sure enough, the beetle was winning. Treatment was experimental in Holland and elsewhere, but no cure was guaranteed. The arborist at the company recommended by the consultant—RTEC Tree Care in Virginia, which looks after trees on the Capitol lawn and  National Mall—suggested we could each save considerable money by taking down the two trees together. He was right: Together the damage came to a little under $10,000. It would have been more to have the stumps dug out.

That’s when the heritage issue came up. A local Ward 6 arborist, employee of the DC Urban Forestry Administration, had to testify  that our trees were hazardous to the public’s well-being. But since mine was on the city’s published list of undesirable invasive species, I probably didn’t need his report, he said—not unless neighbors complained about a sudden loss of shade.

Working with a bureaucracy in a pandemic to arrange permits isn’t easy. RETC managed to fix a date with DC’s Transportation Department to close the block, but a forecast of wind and rain forced a cancellation.

Two weeks later, the largest crane I’ve ever seen rumbled up at dawn, planting itself on the street along with auxiliary trucks and crew. A burly conductor directed this steel contraption with the console’s buttons, guiding its giant arm in wide sweeps across houses two and three stories high. A computer aboard helped gauge with impressive precision how limbs weighing as much as two tons each could be landed safely. Each move was done in coordination with a crew on ropes wielding chain saws as deftly as scissors, in the air and on the ground.

No better show this season than most movies and Zoom sessions, I’ll wager.

“It’s all physics,” said  RTEC arborist Jim, as if that explained the dynamics involved.

The elm disappeared first, the ailanthus after lunch. Wood that wasn’t  ground up at once was hauled away. By 3pm, all that remained were naked stumps barely a foot high. A sad sight for an elm that had spent its life enlivening the sky and harboring wildlife. Its cut was clean and solid.

Not so the ailanthus, whose stump revealed a deep hollow full of decay. I plopped a large potted palm inside the hole to cover the gap. I liked the idea of having a decorative Ikea plant preening in a space recently occupied by my unruly specimen, a pesky dangerous overgrown weed. Come winter, I’ll substitute a fake version.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

—Ann Geracimos

The new use for the near-useless ailanthus: as a rustic planter. / Photo by Ann Geracimos.

Here’s a challenge: Find the parakeets. Hint: There are three of them in there. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I’M GOING OUT to sweep leaves,” announced My Prince. “Alexa, play Bach, please.” He’s very polite to Alexa, though he insists he hates her. “It’s for the birds,” he told me, heading out the door. 

We have parakeets again. What’s a jungle without them? That is what the little enclosed back porch off my office becomes each winter, when the tropical plants move from garden to shelter until the warmth returns. 

Years ago, Baby bought me an antique bird cage, which clearly called for the acquisition of tenants. Did you know birds have quite definite personalities? Individual voices? This was a surprise. I thought of them as ornamental, brightly feathered objects—like the ones with little clips that we hang on the Hanukkah bush. 

We bought two (parakeets, not Hanukkah bushes), since they were obviously a couple, snuggling on a perch and picking each other’s nits. There was Vinnie, who met a tragic end, which I am still too traumatized to discuss. I’ve saved a feather in a locket. Shakira, Vinnie’s mate, was so depressed we brought him a new friend, then added two more. Then, all of them went feet-up one night, we know not why. 

This was too horrific for me; no more birds, I said—though this past summer we fostered a dove, Hortense, who was rehomed after several months. She now has her own room in your typical McLean, Virginia, cottage. 

Our new little flock was not my idea. It was My Prince who said, It’s time.  

If you ask me, this budgie-craving has to do with watching too much British TV. If we’re not watching British TV I’m reading another murder mystery set in the wilds of Yorkshire or on what they call a beach at Brighton. Being cooped up for months with this stuff, I can forget entirely where I am. Which has been a blessing. 

In addition to tea, at every opportunity it seems, the Brits have budgies that little old ladies—like me but with crimped hair and floral house dresses—coo to over their tea. Is tea a drink? A snack? A light dinner? All three? Discuss. Also. Pudding. Why? That was an aside.

Anyway, I said, Fine, but these can’t be any old birds, they have to be fabulous, we must feel an instantaneous bond. 

Off we went to Petco, where, instead of cages full of budgies there were just three sitting on a branch, and damned if they weren’t beauties. There were two blues, with gorgeous markings, and one white, snowy white, as white as a bird can be. 

They were not just beautiful but lively and curious, staring at us through the bars like vultures. Don’t you want to take us home? they cheerfully glared. Just irresistible. 

The blues were the most engaging and clearly a pair. We were here for two, not three. The white, though it shared a perch, was sleepier, less interested, less interesting, but could we leave one bird in the cage?

I asked a pleasant young saleswoman for a break if we took all three. She said no, a new shipment would arrive within a few says so the bird wouldn’t be lonely for long. But we couldn’t leave it, shun it, traumatize it in such a way. So, we looked at each other and said, Fine. We’ll take all three. 

The birds were chased down in a flurry of feathers and squawks and placed in a small box and we got on the socially distanced checkout line. 

Not more than a minute later, a woman appeared.

“Where are the parakeets?” she cried.

“We just sold the last ones,” said the saleswoman.  

“But I called and was told you had them! I wanted one for my son,” she added sadly. 

Oy! The guilt. We momentarily thought about giving her the white one, and what stopped us I don’t know. Later I mollified myself, thinking perhaps a white parakeet was not a boy thing. Then Baby, evil wench, said it was probably the kid’s birthday and . . . 

Oy, just pile on the guilt, why don’t you. 

It was in the car on the way home that I named the white one Anderson Cooper. The whitest bird named for the whitest man alive. 

The Prince named the blue with black slashes across his wings The Boss. Because that is clearly his  function. You go here, You go there, Move over. The orders are clear, and the others obey. 

There’s one more name to go, perhaps Del, for delphinium. MK, mother of Baby’s Personal Prince Pete, said he’s the precise color of the flower. 

So far they show no interest in the salad that surrounds them, the hibiscus, jasmine, lemon, bird of paradise and so on. 

I don’t much care for salad either. Welcome home, birds. 

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” loves her some wildlife, maybe more rewarding than plants that won’t talk back to her.

IT’S NO secret that retailers are offering special promotions to whet our appetite for Christmas shopping. But we found a few offers that seem tailor-made for us grownup girls. (Be aware that if you happen to purchase something through one of these links, MyLittleBird may receive a commission. Also, some of the discounted prices shown are available only through the links given here.)

I haven’t ventured into an Anthropologie store so I can’t know for sure, but these “relaxed velvet” button-down shirts look butter-soft (but not as sticky). They come in the gold and turquoise shown, also in lilac, a deep inky blue and a lively raspberry. Obviously intended for all grownup girls, the shirts come in standard misses sizes up to size 14 and, depending on the color, in petite and plus sizes as well. The loose-fitting Pilcro Mara Relaxed Velvet Button-down shirt is $128, but Anthropologie is offering 30% off everything on the site November 25 through November 30.

LEFT: A very special Christmas stocking for a special little kid (age 4 and up). The 10-inch stocking comes with an 8-inch mouse prince or princess. Choose the rose color for the mouse in pink tulle and blue for the mouse clad in navy blue trousers. The Miniature Mouse Stocking is designed by 10×2 Studio in collaboration with Anthropologie and each set (stocking and mouse) is $28 (but note the 30% off listed above).

RIGHT: A modern, minimalist baby (or at least the modern, minimalist parents) should appreciate these Crew-Neck Long-Sleeve Bodysuits, in sizes up to 24 months, from Uniqlo. Each two-piece 100% cotton set comes in light gray, deep yellow or a rich blue and is $9.90, but you can grab two sets for $14.90. It might take some doing, but if you rack up a $150 purchase at Uniqlo, they’ll give you a set of three white AIRism face masks as a gift, as long as stocks last (you can also buy the set of face masks alone for $14.90).

LEFT: Is there anyone unhappy at the sight of a Harry & David gift box coming their way? Hard to imagine. The Christmas Snack Box shown is $79.99. Included are six of their big, juicy Royal Riviera Pears, a couple of kinds of sausage, a couple of cheeses, some crackers—you get the picture. Also, on their Sale page, Harry & David are offering chocolate-covered fruit, fudge mint cookies and other goodies.

RIGHT: These Sennheiser earbuds are far more sophisticated than some of us will ever be: They promise fabulous sound (natch), plus refined touch controls, a seven-hour battery life—and the music stops when you take the earbuds off and resumes where you left off when you reinsert them. The Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless V2 Earbuds come with a charging case and are $299.95 at Neiman Marcus, and they qualify for a $50 discount when you use the code THANKFUL when checking out.

LEFT: That sexy Dyson Supersonic hair dryer is still a heart-stopping $399.99, but the Dyson site is offering two gifts worth up to $120 with your purchase. You select the gifts at checkout (they include a choice of a hair dryer stand, a silver case for the appliance, and vented barrel brushes).

RIGHT: The House of Fluff has figured it out: Their faux fur is made from recycled post-consumer plastic bottles, and they’ve developed BIOFUR, made with a plant-based polymer. Beyond that, the colors and the styles are great. The 100% Recycled Teddy Hoodie, shown in lavender, also comes in marine blue (other BIOFUR styles include a cool zip-front ski jacket, anoraks and peacoats). The hoodie is $375, but House of Fluff is offering a 15% discount to MyLittleBird readers using the checkout code THANKS15.

Snow or no snow, winter requires boots. And Zappos has some discounts in mind, available up till December 1.

LEFT: It’s 40% off Sorel boots at Zappos.com. Shown are the Explorer Carnival boots with a waterproof nylon upper. Available in six colors (including red and a great army green), they’re $129.95, less the discount.

RIGHT: Crocs also get 40% off till December 1. Shown here is the Classic Blitzen III Clog, also available in navy with slate gray faux shearling collar, $49.99, less the discount.

LEFT: Hard to imagine a more enduring buy than a classic Barbour Waxed Cotton Rain Jacket with removable faux shearling collar. We’re all mad for what Barbour calls Archive Olive this year, but the field jacket also comes in black. It was $475, but is now $289.97 at Nordstrom Rack.

RIGHT: Outdoor Voices has come up with a style that blends trends: It’s a bomber jacket, plus it’s made of cozy MegaFleece,  and it features subtle color-blocking. Here’s it’s an Oatmeal/Amber matchup; the jacket also comes in black. It’s $158, but for new customers with orders over $100, there’s a 20% discount until November 26.

—Nancy McKeon

MyLittleBird often includes links to products we write about. Our editorial choices are made independently; nonetheless, a purchase made through such a link can sometimes result in MyLittleBird receiving a commission on the sale, whether through a retailer, an online store or Amazon.com.

iStock

We asked, you answered!

Remember these from the 1950s? The Vermont Country Store has them.

I SENT each household in my family a set of those Pilgrim and turkey candles from the Vermont Country Store with a note saying something like “if we can’t all be around a table together at least we can all gather around the same creepy Pilgrims.” They’re so nostalgic from our youth, but I’m not sure why because as soon as you light them their faces start to melt and they look very creepy!

WE WANTED to include my mom, who is 78, in our Thanksgiving, so my husband and the two girls and I have opted to eat outside around the fire pit. I thought it would be depressing to eat our usual Thanksgiving dinner under campsite conditions, so we’re ordering takeout instead of cooking. (If it rains, I’ll deliver dinner to Mom in a picnic basket and we’ll FaceTime during the meal.)

Since we’ll be outside, I’m going to serve hot drinks instead of wine—I just found a recipe for spiced apple cider hot toddies online. I figure we might as well lean into the weirdness of the situation: I ordered a kitschy vintage Thanksgiving tablecloth for the outdoor table and naturally I’ll be wearing a mask with a beak and wattle on it.

—Nicole Arthur

Arlington, Virginia

ORDINARILY I’d be with one of my children, and my friend Steve would be in Brookline with his daughter and her family, but it definitely doesn’t seem wise this year. So I’m going to stay here. Steve and his dog will come here for a late afternoon meal (which I have actually ordered from Fresh Direct). My favorite side dish for turkey (or pork or game or even sausages)—is drained and well-rinsed sauerkraut braised with a sautéed sliced onion, grated apples (or even chunky applesauce), a little white pepper and white wine. It’s addictive. It’s my sole T-giving tradition.

—Judith Weinraub

New York City

 

If Thanksgiving dinner is outdoors, hot toddies are the appropriate quaff. This one is from The Spruce Eats (see story for a link to the recipe).

WE ARE ONLY eating with our three college kids. Usually have parents and siblings here but abandoned that this year. Hoping to meet up with some friends for a distanced gathering in Rock Creek Park over the weekend.

Can’t emphasize enough how careful people need to be these next 4 months until the vaccines gets distributed. Mostly because hospitals are full or filling up, so if you get sick, the options for acute Covid care are shrinking.

—Sian Spurney, MD

Chevy Chase, Maryland

WITH NO family to entertain this Thanksgiving, my husband and I both ‘fessed up to each other: We hate turkey. After 37 years of marriage, we each felt free to admit it. Amazing what revelations can come out of a worldwide pandemic.

So we ordered an “everything but the turkey” menu of side dishes for two from a local caterer, along with a hearty cassoulet of chicken thighs, sausage and cannelloni beans.

And we forever banished that bird from our family table, even when the relatives come back.

—Jacqui Salmon

Charlottesville, Virginia

WE HAVEN’T SEEN our kids or 3-year-old grandson in a year. Everyone’s staying put for the holiday—and no one’s happy about it—but the risk of getting the virus is even scarier.

It feels less like Thanksgiving this year than just Thursday night dinner. I know I’m making a past fave for the two of us of seared duck breast with cherries and port sauce (yup, just a typical Thursday), but unsure about the rest. Pumpkin pie for dessert, the only thing my husband says is immutable. And rooting for the Cowboys.

MY HUSBAND and I are baking stuff for our two distant grown sons and sending it via priority mail [last Saturday]. We will make turkey and squash soup (at least) for the two of us—not eating with anyone else but will Zoom with our sons on the day and enjoy some of the baked goods together, I hope.

LittleBird Stephanie’s mom. / Photo by Jerry Siegel.

I ALWAYS considered my dad to be the family artiste. The showman. The bon vivant. Mom? She was the handmaiden. 

It’s my birthday and I’m thinking of her. She’s been gone 42 years, and I’m saddened that I scarcely realized how extraordinary she was until long after she was gone. 

Dad was the fat, spoiled youngest of seven, with a charge account at the candy store around the corner from the family’s brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Wealthy and Jewish, they had a highly vocal parrot named Polly (a name that at some point in time must have seemed original) and a cat, whose name I never learned. Dad went to Wharton.  

Mom was the second of 11 children of Polish Catholic immigrants, raised in a coal-mining town in central Pennsylvania. She dropped out of school after the eighth grade, working in a cigar factory to help support the family. My grandfather lost his sight and hearing in a mining accident.   

I mean, can’t all mothers cut hair—and devise styling tricks that would not be seen for another 30 years?

I knew she wrestled herself out of that coal-mining town and came to New York and became a beautician, working at a salon near Broadway, doing hair for the showgirls. To support herself through school she worked as a housekeeper for my grandfather and my dad, his siblings grown and gone.

Fairy-tale stuff. 

They married after World War II, not an easy match in the days when religion was a massive barrier, never mind the lack of education, and family wealth and so forth. It was many years before my dad’s family accepted my mom, even though she studied and converted. 

Aren’t all mothers fantastic cooks who can whip up a stuffed breast of veal for a Tuesday dinner?

I think it was her cooking that sealed the deal. She was a fine cook to begin with, but when Dad was overseas, Mom continued to care for my grandfather, learning the fine points of latkes, brisket and the lightest of matzoh balls—better than my grandmother’s. 

She could have opened a deli, and won raves.

Dad grew up to be a portly man, with exquisite taste and style and a rather overwhelming personality. A furniture designer and manufacturer who resembled Bill Blass, his suits were handmade, as were his French-cuffed shirts and his shoes. His handkerchiefs were monogrammed linen. He chose the silks for his pocket squares and ties. Of course, there were hats and coats and gloves as well; these were simply expensive. He traveled with a steamer trunk. 

It seemed Mom spent her mornings taking shirts to the cleaner, brushing his suits, ironing his handkerchiefs. Then visiting the butcher, the baker, and the market for dinner.

Around noon she’d head downtown to Dad’s furniture showroom, a cavernous space, open only to the trade. 

Can’t all mothers arrange flowers?

There were five or six ever-changing vignettes in the showroom, which required ever-changing floral arrangements, and seasonal showings of new furniture. She did the flowers for the vignettes in vases she selected, and more for the entry and for the tabletops that were dotted about. Fantastical dislays: Chiquita Banana headdresses made of the faux flowers and leaves she picked out at a wholesaler downtown.  

Her fingers were magical. No need for frogs and wire supports, she twisted and twined, going by instinct. Mop-headed hydrangeas mixed with greens and sprigs of this and that as flying punctuation. Wouldn’t purple and orange tulips be glorious here? Or there?

The Waldorf-Astoria could have welcomed her work.

Mom was brilliant with real plants as well, though the Christmas cactus and poinsettias tended to bloom around Valentine’s Day.  We had a wonderful terrace that wrapped our corner apartment on the Upper East Side, with an unobstructed view of all downtown and a glimpse of the East River, and planters with boxwood and bulbs, something always in bloom. (After Dad died she grew marijuana for some young friends, but that’s another story). 

In the summer we’d play Scrabble out there, on a big round wrought-iron table (now on my back porch). Mom would regularly beat Dad, one three-letter word after a two. 

So as we approach Thanksgiving Day, I say thank you, Mama, for the gifts you’ve given me. So many I simply assumed came from Dad, the showman, really came from you. Love, Stevie.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” has a lot to be thankful for. Like the rest of us.

The French organization Culturespaces has installations in a number of French cities, although they are all now closed until December 1, 2020 because of Covid concerns. This exhibit, “Gaudí: The Architect of the Imaginary,” is a homage to the Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudí and here shows one of his iconic Barcelona houses, the dynamism of which caused people to take a fresh look at Art Nouveau. Elements from Gaudí’s masterworks, Barcelona’s Park Guëll and Sagrada Familia cathedral, are also explored in the show, which is installed in the Carrière de Lumières, a former quarry in Les Baux-de-Provence in southern France. / © Culturespaces.

GIVEN THE hyperstimulated life we live, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a simple stroll through an art museum isn’t quite enough.

Enter the immersive installation. Sometimes it’s a show dedicated to beloved paintings translated digitally and projected in such a large and commanding way that we can feel we are stepping into them. Then there are the installations that are high-tech, kinetic light shows, such as the ones devised by the American firm Artechouse, with exhibit spaces in New York, Washington DC and Miami Beach. Its current triumvirate of shows, called Submerges by the creators, explore the Earth, the Sky and the Oceans, and all celebrate Classic Blue, the Pantone Color of the Year for 2020. (Blue promises peace and tranquility, which the Artechouse folks acknowledge we could all use round about now, assuming we’re willing to fork out $24 for admission.)

These playful images are plucked from the imaginative Park Guëll in Barcelona, one of architect Antoni Gaudí’s masterworks and part of the view from his house. This is part of “Gaudí: The Architect of the Imaginary,” an immersive art show by the French organization Culturespaces, installed (but currently closed) at the Carrières de Lumières venue in Les Baux-de-Provence, in southern France. / © Culturespaces.

Klimt’s world-famous “The Kiss” from 1907-08 loomed digitally over exhibit-goers in this 2014 installation by Culturespaces, the French museum foundation. / © Culturespaces.

In France, Culturespaces, a museum foundation, has recaptured unused or little used spaces—an abandoned quarry here, an old foundry there—and has reimagined them as art spaces. These are the exhibits of the “real art” variety, wherein paintings and motifs projected on walls dwarf the visitors and surround them with color.

(Here’s where it helps to use extremely well-known images. The Chagall installation I visited in the South of France in 2016 featured the artist’s dream-like images arriving and disappearing, floating around overhead, with no explanatory material, no reference points. To make things more confusing, there was an adjacent “secondary” exhibit of images from “Alice in Wonderland” popping in and out, sliding up the wall, then disappearing. True, they both related to dream sequences and presumably the ephemeral nature of same, but printed materials [that could be read in the dark!] might have provided the connections. Nonetheless, the physical reaction to being overwhelmed by art was substantial.)

Being inside Claude Monet’s waterlily pond is one experience this previous installation by Culturespaces offered. / © Culturespaces.

“Regular” museums have upped the adrenaline too, offering spectacles such as, in 2017, the Hirshhorn Museum’s 50-year retrospective of 91-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama with six of her “Infinity Mirror” rooms . . . and lots of polka dots. The National Building Museum, also in DC, has had regular crowd-pleasing installations—among others, “Lawn,” “Icebergs” and “The Beach,” featuring a pool filled with thousands of recyclable plastic balls for visitors to flail around in.

The “Celestial” installation in Artechouse’s New York venue allows total immersion in the color Classic Blue, underfoot, overhead and around the rooms. / © Artechouse.

“Cristalline,” an immersive installation by Artechouse in Washington DC. The color, like that of the other current Artechouse installations, is based on the Pantone Color of 2020, Classic Blue. It promises visitors “a sense of peace and tranquility . . . for these turbulent times.” / © Artechouse.

Artechouse’s Miami installation is “Aqueous,” exploring water as a source of serenity. It takes its cue from the Pantone Color of 2020, Classic Blue. / © Artechouse.

These don’t seem to be very “serious” approaches to art, but there is an integrity to their execution. And it’s not as though art has always been about serious purpose and scholarship. Over the millennia, it has been variously totemic, boastful, solemn, sacred (as long as the painter’s patrons were depicted down in front), playful, vituperative and, well, lots more adjectives. So add “immersive” to the list.

—Nancy McKeon

Artechouse Miami, “Aqueous,” through April 14, 2021. miami.artechouse.com.

Artechouse New York, “Celestial,” ongoing. artechouse.com.

Artechouse DC, “Cristalline,” through January 3, 2021. dc.artechouse.com.

Culturespaces, exhibits closed because of Covid-19 until December 1, 2020. culturespaces.com.

A 2014 Culturespaces exhibit focused on Vienna Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt. The floor motif is from Klimt’s “Tree of Life.” From left rear are “Judith and the Head of Holofernes,” the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, “The Kiss” and “Two Women Friends.” The exhibit was presented at  Culturespaces’s Baux-de-Provence venue, a former quarry, the Carrières de Lumières. / © Culturespaces.

Chinese privet, which Southern Living magazine calls a worse invader than kudzu. LittleBird Stephanie doesn’t like the sticky-sweet smell of its flowers. / iStock photo.

REMEMBER Nero Wolfe? 

One of the great fictional detectives of the mid-20th century, Wolfe is an American Hercule Poirot, with a townhouse on Manhattan’s West 25th Street and a house number that would put him in the middle of the Hudson River.

Author Rex Stout’s sleuth is a man of enormous girth who never leaves the house and is kept magnificently fed by his private chef. Wolfe employs a gumshoe named Archie to do all the investigative legwork, while he putters for hours in his rooftop plant rooms, tending thousands of exotic orchids, with the assistance of an orchid nurse. 

I was thinking of Wolfe the other day as I puttered in my little greenhouse, clipping a dried leaf here and there, pinching and potting-up stray stems. 

There was a mystery afoot, which we’ll get to after this unnecessary aside . . . 

The tropical plants are all in for the winter, should winter ever arrive. The weather here in Washington DC is, from what I’ve heard, like August in Maine, sunny and 80 at noon, cooling down just enough for a sweater at dusk. I’ve been to Maine only once, and it was cold and wet and miserable, like Scotland, where I spent a long-ago week under a quilt at a Salvation Army hostel feeding shillings into a space heater beside the bed. 

Returning to today’s story. There was a column I wrote several weeks ago wherein I mentioned a plant that spent decades languishing in a pot by the front door, but quickly grew enormous and lush when moved to the curbside. I don’t recall where we got it, quite possibly it was a foundling that looked like it would do in the spot. I can’t imagine having bought such a boring plant.

Once it was moved, it also chose to flower, great panicles of disgustingly sweet white flowers that appeared each spring. 

With the blossoms spent, it did make a fine framework for a flower arrangement. The slender but stiff branches and neat green leaves supported the heavy heads of hydrangeas and roses and such. 

Over the weeks it let down a tangle of roots, so when it came time to redo the six window boxes in the front of the house I stuck the branch in one, then clipped five more stems to center in the others. The idea being that, come spring, they could be transplanted to Baby’s backyard in Raleigh, North Carolina, creating a fine screen at the end of the property—far enough from the house that the scent might be considered charming, wafting in on a stray breeze.  

A sharp-eyed reader said she thought the plant might be a privet, adding that they’re cloyingly sweet and invasive, and she’s trying to get rid of hers.  

My friend Karen Amy, a professional gardener, wandered by and confirmed it. Then, I looked it up. Oh my. 

Southern Living magazine calls privet the “South’s worst weed.” It’s worse than kudzu, they say, “because kudzu needs sun to grow. Chinese privet, on the other hand, grows just about anywhere. In sun. In shade. In wet soil. In dry soil. In the city. In the country. On the surface of Pluto.”

Which at first sounds like a brilliant plant to have, but no . . . they say it should be banned, chopped down, decimated with Roundup.

This was dreadful news. Can you have a British murder mystery without a privet hedge? There’s always a body beneath one, a miscreant peering through the branches, a line of them leading to a sinister thatch-roofed cottage. 

I puttered about in the greenhouse, popping jelly beans (I don’t have a chef), and called my British friend Maggie Hall, who divides her year between an apartment near me in Washington and a house in Whitby, where Count Dracula first landed in England, per novelist Bram Stoker.* 

“Of course,” sniffed Maggie. “The privet, everyone has one.” Or words to that effect. Indeed, says Wikipedia, in the 1940s decorative ironwork was requisitioned for the British military for armaments and privet hedges were used to replace ornamental fencing. 

The Brits know their gardens, for heaven’s sake; how evil could this shrub be? 

Uh, pretty bad, they say: Though there are 50 varieties of privet and not all are invasive, it’s pretty hard to tell which is which until they wriggle around below ground and start springing up every which where and you never get ahead of them and they throttle every other plant in sight. 

As far as I can tell, we don’t have an invasive privet. While it grows half again taller and wider each year, it stays in its assigned plot. 

I trust it will behave as well for Baby. If it doesn’t, My Prince will be dispatched with an axe and Roundup to clean up the mess. 

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” loves mystery series almost as much as she loved plants.

* Maggie’s howling new book All Things Dracula: an A-Z of the Count Who Refuses to Die is available on Amazon. It’s a bloodbath of wit and wisdom. 

LEFT: Yves Saint Laurent introduced “le smoking,” his provocative tuxedo look for women in the 1960s and let it evolve over the years. For the first time, women wore pants to work (controversial even in more recent times), for play and even out on the town at night. Shown here on the model Ulla is the “First” tuxedo, fall-winter 1966, haute couture. / Photo © Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, Paris/Gérard Pataa. RIGHT: Mary Quant of London is the one who introduced the miniskirt, inspired by what the young girls on the streets of London were wearing. The style arrived Stateside in 1966, and Isadore Barmash of the New York Times called it “the most important British import since the Beatles.” Indeed. / © Museum at FIT, New York.

THE OTHER DAY I sent the photos for this post to our art director, LittleBird Kathy, and in return she confessed that she’s been whiling away some pandemic hours re-watching episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

“I love most seeing the clothes we used to wear,” Kathy wrote. “The perky mini dresses, the flared pant suits. The clothes were so darned cute then. . . . I just never understood why Rhoda lived in an unfinished attic.”

Mary’s clothes were the cute ones, mostly. They were ’60s-meets-modern-working-woman. Her neighbor and sidekick Rhoda, with  all those gypsy-like head scarves, was the other ’60s-’70s woman—exotic and brassy (with one helluva New York accent) and just the type of person, I would argue, to live in an unfinished attic.

Kathy loved Mary’s clothes but Rhoda’s brass.

All of this is by way of saying that the Museum at FIT sent out a Designer Spotlight this week featuring the 1960s designs of couturier André Courrèges, contained in the museum’s collection of 50,000 pieces of clothing and accessories. Exquisitely tailored, the garments are the shining models for the bonded-polyester dresses many of us came to wear back then as the designs of Courrèges and London designer Mary Quant made their way down the fashion ladder to those of us near the lower rungs. (That bonding gave cheaper clothes the structure without the expense of sophisticated tailoring.) The look was always lean, the silhouette uncluttered.

But the Museum at FIT also has a couple of videos, parts one and two of 100 Years of Fashion on its website. Scrolling through the decades with the FIT curatorial staff shows us how far we’ve come and . . . not. Coco Chanel’s relaxed jersey separates were heralded in the 1920s as radical because they were simple and comfortable. Today, I find them dowdy; her design house languished for some years before the fashion genius Karl Lagerfeld took over and sexed up the look, the one we know today.

Poring through the FIT online files is a bit of a treasure hunt with a somewhat tricky map. But the search can be worth a solid hour or two. It’s certainly capable of drowning out Election 2020 angst.

—Nancy McKeon

Paris didn’t have the street-fashion scene of London, so, the FIT museums’s curators explain, couturier André Courrèges used the idea of “the future” to begin his own fashion odyssey into the modern. The technically gifted dressmaker had worked for Balenciaga and created such structured pieces as the elegantly constructed short-jacketed suit on the right, from his first collection, fall-winter 1961-62. The other two garments, from 1967 and ’68, were more pared-down, more direct, using fabrics that held structure for a new silhouette. / © Museum at FIT, New York.

And what a pared-down future Courrèges envisioned. To address the younger, less affluent customer, he created a diffusion line, Couture Future (which really rhymes in French). His signature look is embodied in this space-age dress from around 1965 with helmet hat, plus the signature white boots, which were widely copied and came to be known as go-go boots. / © Museum at FIT, New York.

The Museum at FIT is featuring two video episodes of “100 Years of Fashion,” available from its website. The still photo shown here is Coco Chanel in 1928 dressed in her rule-breaking soft jersey ensemble, clothes that didn’t require serious undergarments and were meant to be comfortable and modern. This look is a far cry from what the typical Chanel suit (tweed, fringed edges, gold buttons) evolved into, but in a way it looks just as dowdy. The Chanel suit was revived when Karl Lagerfeld took over the design and added sex and excitement to it. / Photo Coco Chanel in Biarritz, France, via Chanel.com, © TopFoto / Roger-Viollet.

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” champions artificial flowers in her window boxes and elsewhere outdoors. Her affection for them does not extend to their use in the house. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I’M SITTING at the dining table staring at a milk jug filled with peonies in full bloom. They are fake. 

The jug appeared on the kitchen counter a few days ago, along with a clay pot with a live plant I suspect is Mexican heather; a little leggy but healthy enough.  

My Prince found the pot of heather on our front steps. I don’t know who left it or why. It’s like an offering and I feel honored. Plants do find their way here. Our good friends Robert and Judith brought a planter filled with geraniums when they came to dinner Sunday night. They decided they’re done with their Country French in the Courtyard concept and so the flowers are mine. 

The fake peonies—one full-blown white, three pink and a pink bud—are another matter. 

The Prince and I are scavengers, magpies picking up sparkly stuff—though our street taste is exceptional, if I say so myself. Among the finds: several fine Oriental rugs, Limoges coffee cups, a fanciful wrought-iron bistro set and a Downton Abbey library of a leather club chair. That last was actually retrieved on a trip to the city dump;  A truck bed of trash was left, the chair came home. 

When you live in a fast-paced city like Washington, where life transitions can be abrupt, treasures are left on the street with some frequency. Also, when you’ve been doing this for 40 years you can be very fussy about what you pick up. 

The peonies are another story. The Prince found them on a walk to Eastern Market, bringing them home to me like a cat with a dead bird. It’s one thing when Aunt Elphaba presents you with a horror of a vase.  You smile, thank her and stuff it in the closet—in case she visits. It’s another when . . . well. 

Have you picked up on how much I dislike those peonies? Sorry, my sweet, I know you’re reading this, but please no. No fake flowers inside the house. 

Outside is another matter – and perhaps I’m responsible for the confusion. There’s a sprinkling of fake geraniums in the upper window boxes when nothing is in bloom, and a six-foot fake banana tree tucked in a corner of the back porch. I’ve been known to wire fake lilies to stems of plants when flowers die, and spray-paint astilbe when their blossoms fade to brown.

I consider this to be garden trompe l’oeil, a surrealistic tease for the eye to make you smile. There’s nothing magical about fake flowers inside the house. Unless the place is on the market and they’re used for zero-maintenance decoration, please no.  

They certainly should never be sitting two feet from your nose on the dining room table, where you can’t avoid the artificial sheen of the leaves, the slight fraying of the flower’s fabric edges. Most of all, the sad scentlessness. 

Please, my love, I appreciate the thought, but take them away. 

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” is, let’s face it, a snob about fake fleurs.

The walls of Jeanne Lanvin’s bedroom, designed by Armand-Albert Rateau in collaboration with the fashion designer, is upholstered in silk in what came to be called “Lanvin blue.” In 1925, the fabric was embroidered in the Lanvin workrooms, but to replace faded pieces, the museum re-created the fabric and sent it to India to be embroidered, like the original, with cotton and copper thread. The daisy motif was inspired by Lanvin’s daughter, Marguerite, which is the name of the flower in French. / © MAD. Photo by Jean Tholance.

MANY OF US know Lanvin as a “brand” of classic perfumes (My Sin, Arpège). But before the fragrances was, of course, Jeanne Lanvin the early-20th-century Paris fashion designer, who went from milliner to influential couturier and expanded into home fashion and, in 1924, fragrance.

Lanvin collaborated with renowned French interior designer Armand-Albert Rateau in creating the interiors of her offices and shops—and her own Paris townhouse. When that house was about to be demolished, in 1965, Lanvin’s grandson saw to it that her private apartment was taken apart and reinstalled, complete with furnishings, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. At the moment, the museum is once again locked down until further notice because of the coronavirus, but its website provides excellent images of the bedroom, boudoir and bathroom of Mme. Lanvin.

Jeanne Lanvin’s boudoir, or private sitting room, stands between a terrace and the magnificent bathroom. / © MAD. Photo by Jean Tholance.

The built-ins and luxurious materials (bronze, marble, hand-embroidered fabrics re-created for the installation) make this ensemble a work of art. But it’s hardly the only one in the museum’s “collection”: There are a late-15th-century bedroom, a drawing room from 1790 and a dining room from 1920, not to mention entire rooms devoted to the evolution of seating , the move from soft-paste to hard-paste porcelain and, just simply, mahogany.

It’s not a trip into the past, or to Paris, but spending some time with Jeanne Lanvin and the other treasures of the decorative arts museum is definitely a break from the uncertain here and now.

—Nancy McKeon

Jeanne Lanvin apartment, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, www.madparis.fr.

The luxurious bathroom, much of it in creamy tones of marble, exemplifies the enthusiasm for the dramatic shared by Lanvin and Rateau. In the vitrine you see the signature black ball-shape bottles of Lanvin’s Arpège perfume. / ©  MAD. Photo by Jean Tholance.

The bathtub in Jeanne Lanvin’s bathroom looks like something found in a Roman ruin, but the bas-relief sculpture on the wall around it has all the earmarks of the Art Deco period. / Photo © MAD, photo by Jean Tholance.

This chaise longue was designed by Armand-Albert Rateau for the Duchess d’Albe in 1921, but this is the one that resided on the Paris terrace of Jeanne Lanvin. It’s bronze, forged by the Bagues frères foundry. / © MAD.

This lacquered, gilded wood screen stood in the dining room of Jeanne Lanvin’s Paris home. It was designed by decorator Armand-Albert Rateau. / © ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Jean Tholance pour Les Arts Décoratifs.

Ivy, sedum, pansies (and whatever that stuff in back is) will keep window boxes lively all winter. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

IS THERE ANYTHING more cheerful on a cold and dreary day than a window box stuffed with sunny flowers and greenery? I think not, which is why I have six: three in the upstairs windows, two in the lower windows, plus a hot pink camellia beside the front door. 

There’s no reason why, in any moderate climate—where the colder days don’t go below 32 degrees for any great stretch—window boxes should not be blooming their heads off throughout, shall we say, the foul-weather season. This does depend on a little advance thought—mainly having boxes high, wide and deep enough to provide plenty of soil for the plants to wriggle about in; made of wood, not terracotta, which can crack in the cold. That, and regular watering should keep them perky.

Which means you can still do it now.  

I’ve just finished the fall refresh, lifting the asparagus fern and the Mexican heather, which will be held over in pots since I have the luxury of a little greenhouse. I also pulled the pothos, my only disappointment. I can’t remember why I put them in the box fronts, where I usually put sweet potato vines. Pothos is green and well behaved, which is fine if you’re not me. If you happen to be me, as I am, you want a lot more flamboyance for the buck, or in this case 25 bucks, the cost of six that did nothing much more than perform a pathetic dribble over the box fronts. Pah. 

By now the sweet potato vines, had I planted them, would have exploded, ruffling down the flat front of the house from the upper boxes, the ones below spilling onto the porch floor. A grand sight. Ah well, there’s always next year, if next year arrives. Please can we speed that up?

Better yet, let’s just cancel this year entirely. Having gone nowhere, done nothing, for how many months, it seems as if we should be entitled to a redo.  I refuse to be another year older, shortly. How swiftly does my dotage come. Oh, the unfairness. That was an aside. 

Getting back to the story at hand. I pulled the summer stuffs, leaving the ivy to soften the ends of the boxes, and the sedum, which manages to put on a nice show most of the year, and planted winter mainstays: pansies, violas, ornamental cabbages, and fat balls of thyme. All of these do very well in this Washington DC climate and will remain charming and lovely and so forth right through spring.

Also left in place, at least until they completely defy all weather logic, are a few stems of fake pink geranium, which add a jolly touch of color. 

As an experiment, I’ve clipped branches of a mystery plant that’s been around for 30-some years and I’ve yet to identify and stuffed them in the back of the boxes to give the boxes, one hopes, some height and majesty. 

It’s an evergreen with sturdy branches and small leaves. Last month, I clipped a branch for a front hall arrangement and it quickly rooted in water, a surprising event that gives me hope that they’ll do well in the boxes as well, letting down roots before frost. 

I doubt that we bought this plant; there’s something about it that says “yanked from the side of the road,” which does happen. However it got here, it spent several decades in the pot by the front door, where it sat doing nothing much in most boring—if perennially green—fashion. 

Maybe five years ago I told my Prince to plant it out by the curb—equivalent to sending the plant to Siberia. And lo! It grew. And grew. And grew. It is now easily 15 feet tall and was heavy with buds last June. By early July it was covered with white flowers of an unfortunate scent, a rotten sort of sweetness, like decomposing lilies in stagnant water, or worse. It made one thankful for masks.  

One might ask why I would plant them in the window boxes (dipped in rooting hormone and well watered). 

If this plant were 40 or so feet from the house the scent would be charming. Just a little wifty on the breeze would make one go mmmmm.  So I’m thinking of Baby and her Personal Prince Pete, who have just such a stretch, and a road behind the house that could do with some obscuring.  

Come spring I’ll yank them and, Covid permitting, will truck them to Raleigh, North Carolina, where they’ll make a terrific border.

As long as you don’t get too close. 

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” 

Statue of a Resting Goat, once part of the Giustiniani collection of Roman art, dates to Imperial Roman times. But some 17th-century restorations have been credited to the great sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a few of whose remarkable works are housed in the nearby Villa Borghese. / © Fondazione Torlonia.

 IF I HAD assembled a hoard of incredible ancient treasures, I suspect I might decide to construct a vast villa and outbuildings and gardens to house them—and then basically keep them to myself. That was what Cardinal Alessandro Albani did in the 18th century, promoting the new neoclassical aesthetic in Rome, filling his villa with ancient marble statuary, many pieces Roman copies of even more ancient Greek ones.

This rather severe statue–an ancient head atop a modern bust–is thought to be of the Servius Sulpicius Galba, emperor of Rome for less than a year. The realism of the face–the deep wrinkles, the furrowed brow–make vivid a man who has been dead since 69 AD. Being emperor had its downsides: Galba was assassinated in January 69 AD by Otho, who then became the next emperor of Rome. / © Fondazione Torlonia.

The Cardinal, nephew of Pope Clement XI, was more than an aesthete. He was a collector, in fact the most voracious collector of classical art in history, according to Clive Cookson, writing in the Financial Times of London. The cardinal sold off his first collection of Roman treasures in 1728 only to start collecting again. He sold his second collection to Pope Clement XII, who made it the basis for Rome’s Capitoline Museums. When Albani died in 1779, it was his third classical collection that he left behind.

The rustic headgear worn by this man led him to be considered someone of lowborn extraction. By another interpretation, also based on the headpiece, the figure has been identified with Eutidemos I, a Hellenistic dynast who reigned over Battriana, a land once part of Alexander the Great’s empire. / © Fondazione Torlonia.

©

—

It was in the 19th century that the Torlonia family of bankers came on the scene, purchasing the Albani villa and its hoard in 1866. The family kept collecting and underwriting excavations and formed a private museum for the statuary, allowing scholars and notables to visit on a limited basis. Eventually, a few years before his death in 2017, Prince Alessandro Torlonia created a foundation dedicated to preserving the villa and its collection.

These “virile statues” exemplify the Greek celebration of the perfect human form. The figure on the right is an athlete who wears a tainia, a headband of victory. The statue is a Roman copy of a Greek original by the sculptor Polyclitus. / © Fondazione Torlonia.

In recent times, the Torlonia family has been opening its doors more generally, with visits accorded upon request. And since last week, more than 90 works from the 620 catalogued marbles in the Torlonia collection have been on view at the new exhibition space at the Capitoline Museums at Villa Caffarelli.

The Torlonia Marbles will be there through June 29, 2021; by then a visit to Italy may be a possibility for Americans.

One art historian who recently had his first opportunity to see some of the Torlonia Marbles explained that because the works had been in private hands for some 200 years, he knew them only as photographs. The Torlonia Foundation website offers only photographs as well, of course, but delving into it supplies the history and the stories behind the marbles, including videos of restoration.

—Nancy McKeon

The Torlonia Marbles: Collecting Masterpieces. Capitoline Museums at Villa Caffarelli, via di Villa Caffarelli, Rome. Tickets must be booked in advance, € 13 for adults (plus a € 1 advance booking fee). Combination tickets that include the Capitoline Museums are also available.

The Torlonia Marbles, on view through June 2021, include many monumental figures. On the left is a depiction of Athena, goddess of war. On the right is Eirene, symbolic of the peace that Athens was proud to maintain after the defeat of Sparta, linking peace with prosperity. / © Fondazione Torlonia.

The competitive decorating hasn’t even started yet on Walter Street SE in DC, but the little porch hints at the beginnings of a “Wizard of Oz” theme. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THERE ARE 50 houses lining Walter Street SE, a one-block stretch of 10-foot-wide porch-front homes on Washington DC’s Capitol Hill. Possibly the most close-knit block in this close-knit neighborhood, the street offers weekly porch-front happy hours, a Christmas tree lighting and holiday celebration, hot dogs on the 4th of July, and odds and ends of what-not in between. When the plague precluded a fancy venue, one neighbor chose to be married in the middle of the street this past summer, surrounded by neighbors rocking on porches and jumping up to cheer.

Clearly, Halloween is special here, with pumpkin patches and ghosts and bats winging here and there, a giant spider that crawls up one of the few big houses near the corner. Everyone comes out to porch-sit, drink wine and hand out candy to a steady stream of little masked monsters.

This year the entire block will be transformed into a set for the Wizard of Oz. Jennifer Cates, who is heading the extravaganza, said the details are cloaked in darkness, but there will certainly be witches and flying monkeys, Dorothy and her friends and a yellow brick road.

Wicked Witch, anyone? / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

In the offing is $1,000 check for the best Halloween display in the neighborhood, which will be gifted to their neighborhood school of choice.

There’s some hot competition.

Called A Literary Pumpkin Walk, and sponsored by the Capitol Hill Community Foundation, this will be, perhaps, a one-off event.

It’s a Covid stand-in for the Capitol Hill Literary Feast, which has been a major fundraiser for local schools since 2006.

The original idea was simple. A dozen or so neighbors would donate their time and dining tables and prepare a meal with a book theme for eight or so neighbors—no reading required. The $75 (minimum) per-person tab would go to the Capitol Hill Community Foundation* for support of local schools.

In those early days one might have got away with pairing The Old Man and the Sea with Mrs. Paul’s Fish Sticks, it was, after all a charitable event—and when was the last time you had fish sticks anyway? Probably in the grammar school cafeteria.

Then, just when I was going to volunteer to do Catch-22, starring mutton with a side of spam, things got complicated.

By last year there were 37 dinner parties, each more elaborate than the last. Live music, petite filets, fine wines—it became a game of can-you-trump-this. You should pardon the expression. Some $40,000 was raised.

The advance speculation over who was doing what was rampant, and the post-dinner reviews breathtaking. Such became the competition in what was, in theory, a completely non-competitive event.

It would be no stretch to say someone might be plotting to import wild boar and an Italian chef this year to prepare a proper pappardelle al cinghiale to gastronomically illuminate Under the Tuscan Sun. There might be a lighting designer involved as well.

Walter Street SE in DC is waiting for your visit. (Hmm, is that Walter, and has he been waiting too long?) / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Instead, we have the Literary Hill Pumpkin Walk, where neighbors pick a book or favorite literary character and decorate  their yards and gardens accordingly. While the guidelines suggest you can carve a pumpkin or stuff a scarecrow, and I’m sure there’ll be some of those, who wants to bet, with so many cunning minds strangled at home for months and months . . . this thing is going to go over the top.

Among the 24 selections already registered are children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Make Way for Ducklings, and Harry Potter this and that, the last of which I’m sure will attract a trove of tiny witches and warlocks. Some homes have selected single characters, like Anna Karenina—that should be a toot—and Neil Gaiman’s graveyard boy “Bod.” Even the Folger Shakespeare Library is getting in on the act—with Macbeth, what else? With their own costume and stage production shop, they have a bit of an advantage.

Personally, I’m salivating over the “Mike Pence version of Lord of the Flies” and the “Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut.” The list of home addresses is at www.literaryhillpumpkinwalk.org,

There is no fee for participation, though donations are welcome. Everyone is invited to vote on a winner, who will get $1,000 for a neighborhood school of their choice. The extravaganza will be unveiled October 24 and remain in place through All Hallows’ Eve.

There will be an armed guard at the ballot box, signature matching, and beheading for any hanging chads.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” leaves her backyard periodically.

*Sign up by email to be included in the Literary Pumpkin Walk Registry and be eligible to win $1,000 for a Capitol Hill school of your choice. Email your name, theme and address to grants@capitolhillcommunityfoundation.org. Don’t worry, no names will be published on the map . . . just the home address and theme will be shared.

For its Balenciaga exhibit, the Victoria and Albert Museum actually X-rayed this balloon-hemmed gown from 1954, showing how the underlying “armature” gave the silk-taffeta garment its buoyant silhouette. All the rest is draping by the hand of the master. / Photos © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. X-ray by Nick Veasey, 2016. © Nick Veasey.

TODAY’S HOUSE OF BALENCIAGA is a triumph of reinvention, with $1,290 high-heeled knit Toe sneakers, aggressively tailored ready-to-wear and a $350 Happy Rat stud earring. All of this might baffle Cristóbal Balenciaga, the Spanish couturier who founded the house in Paris in 1937. But then, so might today’s fashion biz in general, with its hyper-branding and insistence on meeting the street but at a price.

To be sure, Balenciaga made his own kind of splash, dazzling the public and fellow fashion designers of the 1940s and ’50s not only with his design ideas but with his tailoring and construction: He had the pattern-making skills to execute silhouettes that seemed to flout the laws of gravity, and the ability to embrace the female form by sometimes hiding it.

This distilled and rather more rarefied approach to fashion is shared in an online exhibition by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, renowned of course as the world’s largest museum of applied and decorative arts and design. The exhibit shows items of clothing and famous fashion photographs of Balenciaga’s designs, plus videos and even X-rays.

Balenciaga’s “golden age” is said to have been the 1950s and ’60s, when he gave birth to revolutionary silhouettes such as the tunic and the sack, baby doll and shift dresses, all of which remain style staples.

The “Tulip” dress shown below is also featured in black-and-white photos from its couture debut and in a video showing the pattern and construction that went into the famous confection.

Balenciaga’s “Tulip” dress, made for the actress Ava Gardner in 1965, got the full treatment, from the couturier and from the V&A. Here we see the gown and its X-ray, which gives lie to the myth that Balenciaga did not use corseting and stays in his garments. / Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. X-ray by Nick Veasey, 2016. © Nick Veasey.

A model wears the Balenciaga evening dress from 1965 that was dubbed the “tulip” by the press. / Photo © Balenciaga House Archives, Paris. From the Victoria and Albert Museum online exhibit.

All garments, even the simplest, are constructed of several pieces of fabric. These two images, above and below, are from a video that is part of the Victoria and Albert Museum online Balenciaga exhibit. Needless to say, the pattern pieces for this gown are far from ordinary. / From the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

More pattern pieces from the “Tulip” dress by Cristobal Balenciaga, as seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit on the designer.

Balenciaga’s era was one in which women wore hats (men too, for that matter). Like his garments, Balenciaga’s hats were marvels of construction, almost architectural in nature.

In this Richard Avedon fashion image, the fabled model Dovima and dog Sacha display complementary silhouettes while sitting at the Cafe des Deux Magots in Paris. Balenciaga was famous for the wide, shallow saucer-type cloche; he designed this one in 1955, to be worn with a slim, tailored skirt suit. / © The Richard Avedon Foundation. From the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition.

This helical “spiral” hat, says the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibit, demonstrates how Balenciaga liked to strip things down to simple shapes and simple colors. The simplicity could be just an illusion, though: This hat had to be secured underneath by three combs attached to the wearer’s hair. / © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Simplicity? This beret-shaped hat from 1950 seems the antithesis, made of glossy golden straw, mounted onto a wire base and finished with leaves and berries. / © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

—Nancy McKeon

Granddog Tallula finds the sunny greenhouse, off the author’s office, just the place for basking in nature–the sun outside, the wintering-over plants all around her. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

MY PRINCE is getting ahead of himself again.

Comes the first mild day in March and he’s bounding downstairs to shut off the boile—the big old contraption in the basement that the home inspector told us was on its last legs, 38 years ago.  “It’s spring!” he chirps.

But no. Another blast or two of cold comes and he sadly shuffles off to fire things up again. 

Now it’s fall and he’s itching to shut down the air conditioner and clean the chimneys. The other day he asked if we should start moving the tropical plants inside, where they winter in the little greenhouse off my second-floor office. 

No, I said, let’s wait. 

I said this in part because, being forced to agree with him is so disagreeable, but also because it’s merely cool out now and the plants are happy. The elephant ears are waggling, the ferns are lush, and the geraniums that sulked through the summer heat are shivery with pleasure, tossing off new blossoms like it’s the beginning of the season, not nearing Thanksgiving.

When Tallula’s not in residence, there’s even room in the greenhouse for the author to sit and procrastinate over her Green Acre columns. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Fall in Washington DC has a curious effect on the residents, who are rarely born here but hail from everywhere in the world, and every climate. Visit Capitol Hill’s historic Eastern Market on a Saturday morning and you’ll see some shoppers in T-shirts and sandals and others shivering in down jackets and gloves, all picking up their eggs and steaks and cheeses from the inside vendors and the farmers who line the sidewalk. For us, he from Pittsburgh and I Manhattan, sweaters will do until after frost strikes, and that’s rarely before December.

Anyway, I’m at sixes and sevens (what does that even mean?*) about the repotting, hauling and jostling that go into this annual transfer of plants to their winter quarters. Once the pots are inside, there’s figuring out how to stuff an arboretum into a space the size of a terrarium, though I’ll be happy enough once that is done. The scent of flowers in mid-winter is pure joy.  

But as soon as the plants come in, the constant nuisance of watering begins, a need fulfilled rather naturally when they’re lolling about in the garden.  

After years of schlepping one dripping watering can after another from the hall bathroom, through the office, and out to the greenhouse, My Prince rigged a hose that begins at the tap outside the basement, snakes up the house, and is hooked just outside the greenhouse door. In theory, all I have to do is reach out, take it in and spray. Except that there’s the going down two flights and climbing over junk to turn on that basement tap, climbing up to water, then climbing down to shut it off. While good exercise for the derriere, this is also tedious. 

Given that, leaving the plants outside until the last possible gasp of warmth seems desirable.

But he’s right, it pains me to say, that the leaves are turning on the kwanzan cherry and beginning to drop, a process that will speed up in the next few weeks or days. Then the next big rain will shake them free and they’ll land, sticking to the branches of the Meyer lemon and the hibiscus and . . . how is it I have so many jasmines? Anyway, it’s a very messy transfer. 

Equally messy is shuffling a sodden mess of leaves about to make space for the pansies and cabbages, which cheer the view from the kitchen windows when the weather fully turns to bluster, and the tulips and allium, which will be in full billow when the cherry is once again in bloom. Technically, these can be planted well into next month, but it’s easier to get them in now, with the soil still workable and I can see where to put them.   

But first, I think, a cocktail is in order. 

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” is guided by the phases of the moon, the length of our days and the call of her tropical plants yearning for the greenhouse right about this time of year.

*Calling it a state of confusion is just the beginning…

Marking its 25th anniversary, the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto has a new book out, The World at Your Feet. featuring more than 100 of the museum’s most beautiful and important pieces of footwear.

WEARING SHOES is not always fun. Shopping for them is better. But best of all is looking at them: That’s pure delight.

Which is why I’ve been meaning for years to go to Toronto to visit the Bata Shoe Museum. And now, thanks to technology, at least parts of the museum can come to me.

Now in its 25th year, the museum—BSM to its friends—stems from the inspiration, even obsession, of one woman, Sonja Bata. Sonja Bata didn’t create the Bata shoe company—she married into the Czechoslovakian institution when in 1946 she wed the son and successor of the founder, Thomas Bata. But she embraced it, traveling the world with her husband spreading the word of the company’s prodigious output.

The Depression was bad for the company and its workers, World War II was devastating, and post-war nationalization of the factories and retail outlets by the Soviet-controlled Communist government hammered the proverbial nail into the coffin of what had been a global enterprise. The Batas cast about for a new home for the assets they still controlled and were welcomed by Canada.

In her Canadian life, while Sonja Bata was working and traveling with her husband, she was also scouting the world for historical and exotic footwear, material that created her world-class collection of shoes—and eventually gave rise to the museum, with its 14,000 (and counting) shoes and related artifacts covering some 4,500 years of footwear history. Bata died in 2018.

After the 2020 pandemic shutdown, BSM reopened to the public in mid-July, with limited admission and Covid protocols. Its newest exhibition echoes Sonja Bata’s working principle: Every shoe has a story. The Great Divide: Footwear in the Age of Enlightenment explores the ways in which 18th-century footwear reflected the competing philosophies of just who had “natural,” inborn human rights, covering imperialism, sexism, racism—themes that may seem just a bit familiar to 21st-century museum-goers.

The BSM website also has online exhibitions. All About Shoes provides a deep dive into Canada’s aboriginal groups (“Northern Athapaskan Footwear,” anyone?). A bit more commercial is Standing Tall: The Curious History of Men in Heels.

Poking  around the site you learn interesting factoids, such as that women’s gold and silver evening shoes were a big trend during the Great Depression not because they made women feel rich but because, fashion editors advised, either could be worn with any color of evening ensemble (assuming, I guess, you had more than one evening ensemble). And I learned that the original purpose of putting women in high heels was to make their feet look daintier, especially when peeking out from beneath voluminous skirts. There’s a touch of celeb stuff—John Lennon’s Beatle boots, Elton John’s sparkly platforms. And everywhere, serious and less so, is, to mix body parts, terrific eye candy.

—Nancy McKeon 

According to the online exhibit Standing Tall, this small French or English shoe dates to the middle of the 17th century and was most likely made for a well-to-do boy. The fact that the wearer was male is suggested by the shape and type of heel. Stacked leather “polony heels” were popular on men’s footwear at this time. That the child was well-off is indicated by the height of the heel; its marked impracticality helped to declare the wearer’s privilege. The heel is also painted red in keeping with the fashion of the day. / Bata Shoe Museum Toronto.

These are Italian women’s heels from between 1660 and 1700. As the 17th century wore on, the type of heels on men’s footwear expressed two distinctly different forms of masculinity, the refined man of elegance and the man of action. Leather-covered heels came to be worn by men at home or formal settings while stacked leather heels were common on men’s riding boots and other plain, hardworking footwear. Women’s fashion favored covered heels and although clear formal differences emerged between men’s and women’s heels—men’s grew high and were sturdy while women’s tapered to increasingly narrow points—by the middle of the century, the covered heel smacked of refinement, a feature that would eventually damn it in men’s fashion. The stacked leather heel, however, would live on as a signifier of rugged masculinity. / From Standing Tall, Bata Shoe Museum Toronto.

When the Beatles became popular in the early 1960s, they stood at the forefront of the Peacock Revolution, a movement in men’s fashion that sought to reclaim the privilege of extravagant dress. Their signature look included “mop-top” hair, tight-fitting suits, and the now- famous “Beatle boot.” These boots were typical Chelsea boots popular in men’s fashion since the 19th century with the exception that they featured a significantly higher heel, borrowed from male flamenco dancers. This boot was worn by John Lennon. / From Standing Tall, Bata Shoe Museum Toronto.

1970s musicians like Elton John strutted on stage in outrageous outfits and glittering high heels. This pair of stage-worn shoes feature heels reaching 7.5 inches in height. This was made possible by the addition of 5-inch-thick platforms under the forepart of the foot. In the 1970s, men favored footwear with distinct heels rather than shoes with solid platforms, which in the history of Western fashion have always been feminine. These shoes were worn by Elton John. / From Standing Tall, Bata Shoe Museum.

The Enlightenment was characterized by competing claims for human rights, i.e., who was really worthy of them. The school of thought embodied in this shoe is that, really, only European men, and only men of wealth, could truly be said to have “natural” rights. The English shoe from between 1760 and 1780 has a low heel, at that time confirming that it’s a man’s shoe, sumptuous fabric signaling wealth and and an extravagant pink bow. The Great Divide exhibit points out that pink was not a particularly feminine color in that era. / From The Great Divide, Bata Shoe Museum Toronto.

This 18th-century Indian-English shoe, from the Great Divide exhibit, shows a traditional upper-class Indian jutti, a flat shoe, here extravagantly embroidered (including iridescent sequins made from beetle-wings!) that has been made into an Englishwoman’s pump by removing the jutti sole and replacing it with a leather sole and a heel. / From The Great Divide, Bata Shoe Museum Toronto.

In 1790s America, the newborn nation sought to make its own goods. This Boston shoe is flat because by that time heels had become associated with aristocratic excess. / From The Great Divide, Bata Shoe Museum Toronto.

The Bata Shoe Museum is an extravaganza in its own right, with temporary exhibits complementing the extensive permanent collection of shoes and associated artifacts. / Bata Shoe Museum Toronto.

MyLittleBird often includes links to products we write about. Our editorial choices are made independently; however, a purchase made through such a link can sometimes result in MyLittleBird receiving a commission on the sale, whether through a retailer, an online store or Amazon.com.

No riotous colors, the garden, shady most of the year, looks to inanimate objects for a lively punch or two (but check out those caladiums, bottom right). / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

WHILE I HAVE occasionally been accused of blathering on about nothing every week, sometimes I’m hard pressed to do so. 

Usually, I have no trouble dredging up something to say, a knack developed when Baby was in fourth grade, or was it fifth? Her wonderful teacher, Della Spradlin, had the class keep a journal, every week turning in a folder of writing. About what, it didn’t matter, they just had to write. Baby, who preferred lying in the grass and counting butterflies to doing most anything, was not getting with the program. 

So I’d set us down at the dining table with a stack of paper and pens and we’d take turns picking an object in the room to write about. I’d set a timer for five minutes and off we’d go, pens moving nonstop, wherever the words led. By year’s end we’d both amassed files of . . . words. Curious little stories, mine always looking back, to what things meant to me or reminded me of. Hers, containing no memories yet, moved in more fantastical realms. She got an A. 

A fine Covid exercise, if you’ve got a kid around. 

That was an aside.  

This morning. Pressed up against deadline and fallow-brained, I asked the Prince, who happened to be skidding past my office door: “What did you like most about the garden this year?”

“Those big-leafed plants,” he said.

“Which ones? The elephant ears?” 

“Yeah, and what’s that big thing in the corner?”

“The Bird of Paradise?”

“Yeah. I like thinking I’m someplace else, the tropics, the bubbling water in the pond, it’s like being in another world. It’s so green.” 

Green was pretty much it this year, the kwanzan cherry has spread like a gigantic umbrella, spanning the air space, leaving dribbles of sunlight in patches here and there. The garden will only grow darker in years to come, leaving most summer color up to the accessories—the salmon pink of the chairs in the path, the Caribbean blue of the antique garage door with its arched windows. That small building at the end of the pebble path through the garden looks as inviting as a country cottage. (Just don’t open the door.)

The ferns have been fine. I love the way they spill over the flagstones that edge the pond, the way the Boston ferns dangle from the rose of sharon. They need to be dug and divided; they add such a lovely lightness and texture. The hydrangeas have also done very well, surprisingly colorful still. Next year I’ll plant more caladiums—what a bright spot they’ve been, hot pink leaves delicately veined with pale green continuously sprouting and unfolding. They do surprisingly well in flower arrangements too, hanging in for at least a week. 

Despite the darkness of the summer garden, the cherry is usually a little late to leaf out, so we do enjoy a fine spring, with tulips and a couple of climbing roses that manage to straggle up to reach the sun.  

The air is growing crisp. It’s about time to pack it in, move the pots of tropicals to the greenhouse and plant the tulip and allium bulbs under patches of pansies and ornamental cabbages to brighten the spirit.     

There. And I thought I had nothing to say today. 

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” is colorful all by herself

THINK OF IT as the trip you didn’t get to take this year. But this is about as far away from “if it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium” as one can get.

Twenty times since the spring, the Frick Collection curators who have toasted us with Cocktails With a Curator have invited us to “travel” along with them as they revisit places they enjoyed before the Covid lockdown (the Frick will reopen early next year). The 20 places they chose have a connection to an artwork in the museum’s collection, or to the museum’s founders, Henry Clay Frick and his daughter Helen Clay Frick (who helped to found the museum and amassed her own art collection).

The following images are screen grabs taken from various episodes of the Frick Collection’s Travels With a Curator.

—Nancy McKeon

Early in the Travels series, Chief Curator Xavier Salomon (inset, above) visits the city of Jericho, in the Jordan Valley not far from the Dead Sea. One of the treasures of Jericho is Hisham’s Palace, home to the caliph of the area in the early days of Islam. In addition to spirited architectural decoration, the eighth-century palace has the “Tree of Life” mosaic (above) in the bathhouse of the complex. But in no way is the structure the oldest thing in Jericho, which is widely thought to be the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the world.

The “oldest” credit doesn’t even belong to the sixth-century monastery, built by the Byzantines and now owned and managed by the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem. The Monastery of the Temptation follows the contours of the hill itself, the Mount of Temptation (also known as the Mount of Quarantine), and encloses the very rock on which Jesus is said to have stood to repel the Devil, who offered him all the kingdoms of the world if he would follow Satan.

This is the rocky desert area where Jesus “fasted for 40 days and 40 nights,” leading to the Christian practice of a 40-day Lenten period. Salomon points out two connections to the Travels project. First, it’s one of very few places that still exist as they appear in a Frick masterpiece: “The Temptation of Christ” by Duccio di Buoninsegna (although the Judaean hills in the painting look more like the Sienese hills known to the painter!).

Jesus’s fast has significance beyond that, the Italian-born Salomon points out: Forty, in Italian, is quaranta, and the 40-day period a quarantina. That, of course, is the source of the English word quarantine, which is pretty much what we did in the early days of the current pandemic.

The Frick contains two large works by Italian painter Paolo Veronese, but they pale before the 16th-century villa that Veronese “decorated” for the Barbaro family in the Venetian countryside, the Villa Barbaro (or Villa di Maser, for the location) being one of the spectacular structures designed by Andrea Palladio that dot the Veneto region.

Veronese’s work inside the villa combine trompe l’oeil, with faux vistas and statuary, and homely references to household pets and the children of the Barbaro family.

What charms Solomon is that, while the villa is open to the public, it is very much still a “living” thing, inhabited and preserved by the Volpi family since 1934. Shown above is a bedroom (obviously).

The 20th and last stop of the Travels itinerary is the Frick home in Pittsburgh, where the Frick family lived before and even while living in New York, at 1 East 70th Street,.

As curator Salomon explains, when the Frick home in New York was being turned into a museum, in 1935, all of the Frick family’s personal belongings were shipped back to Clayton, the Pittsburgh home, where daughter Helen Clay Frick continued to live (and collect art) and which is today also open to the public, part of several Frick-family-affiliated galleries and museums in their hometown. Shown above is Henry Clay Frick’s library.

Helen Clay Frick had an aesthetic that led her away from her father’s preference for old master paintings (though she certainly prized them as well). She amassed an impressive collection of “gold ground” paintings, 13th- and 14th-century works of tempera on wood panels whose background had an icon-worthy glow from gold leaf, as seen in the “Virgin and Child” by Sassetta, above. Salomon points out that Helen Clay collected more than the expected Duccios and Cimabues; she also purchased unusual works by lesser-known artists that make her collection deep and varied. Her passion for gold grounds was responsible for those now in the Frick Collection in New York, but the bulk of her holdings are at the Frick Pittsburgh, certainly closer than Jericho and worth a road trip.

Among other stops on the Travels With a Curator tour are Honolulu, Hawaii; Grasse, France; Dresden, Germany; Bruges, Belgium. And more—13 more.