Green Acre #148: Vine Not

The vine that provides sweet “honeysuckle mornings” to the Cavanaugh home. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

WHEN BABY was little, I’d wake her for school when the air was filled with flowers.
“It’s a honeysuckle morning,” I’d whisper in her little pink ear, and she’d kick me and
roll over.

“It’s a honeysuckle morning,” I’d say again, a little louder, and she’d flail an arm to bat
me away.

Then I’d dump her on the floor.

Baby is grown now, though she occasionally still sits in my lap. She has a house and a
husband and a garden of her own. Though just in its first spring, there are roses that
climb and roses that bush, and hydrangeas. Sunflower seeds are scattered along the back
border. Because she has sun there are also two lilac trees, which I envy.

She hasn’t grown vine-mad yet, though once the yard is fenced I imagine she will.
There’s a wooded patch alongside her backyard where wisteria grows among the trees,
voluminous with flowers. I hope she’s satisfied with just having it nearby.

Wisteria is a plague, but we’ll get to that.

This morning is a honeysuckle one; the scent is intoxicating, drifting through the window
on a cool breeze.

The 30-year-old vine tosses tendrils over the eight-foot-tall fence, which is undertangled with
ivy. Next to the honeysuckle the rather meager canes and sparse blooms of a no-name
rose that My Prince rescued from the trash many years ago are making their annual
effort to reach the sun, a Sisyphean task given that it’s planted in almost complete shade. At
least it has a little scent, which has become rare for roses.

When I was little, we had a split-rail fence bordering the front lawn; along its length was
woven a particularly spicy rambling red rose. My mother would go out early, early and
snip a posy for my teacher, wrapping it in a damp paper towel and then again in tin foil. I’d
stick my face in the flowers and breathe in the heady scent. I suspect this was a plea to let
me pass arithmetic, division not being my strong suit.

That is neither here nor there, but shows how early was my nose for flowers.

Ivy also covers the wall opposite the honeysuckle and crappy rose. Because I never leave
well enough alone, this is topped with a monstrous coral-colored trumpet vine, the
inspiration for which was a pergola I saw years ago outside a restaurant in Rehoboth
Beach, Delaware. The “essence of tropics” is how I viewed it, though it’s hardy this far north.
I searched for several years for a plant—and once I had one, and planted it, I decided that
it’s hard to come by because it’s nearly the worst vine one could ever plant. It’s thundering along the 30-foot wall, jumping across to the neighbor’s porch rails—and it
is still May.

And yet! I’ve just planted a purple clematis jackmanii beside it. It’s a duel that delicate
climber is certain to lose, but it was the only spot I had left for another vine.

Lording above it all is the never-blooming wisteria, the absolutely worst plant on the face
of the planet. This has coiled itself into a mountainous pile atop the garage, branches
slithering this way and that, silently creeping along the side fences, strangling everything
in its way.

The idea behind the wisteria, which was one of the first two plants in the garden, was to
mimic the one across the alley, which sends up billows of devastatingly sweet purple
flowers each spring, a scent so pervasive, yet not oppressive, that with our front
windows open the house seems to have been tucked with wisteria-scented sachets.

My other idea was a Queen Elizabeth climbing rose, ballet-slipper pink and particularly
fine-scented. The wisteria was to grow across the garage and the rose was to grow up
from a corner to meet it. I had this fantasy that the rose could be trained to arch out over
the round wrought-iron table and chairs like a glorious umbrella. The birds would chirp,
the butterflies would flutter, and we would have brunch and dinner . . .

Do you get the picture?

Well, the rose died, and after 35 years I can still count the wisteria blossoms we’ve had
on my 10 fingers. Oh, how I hate that plant.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” sticks with gardening, one plant death after another.

Met Gala: ‘Camp’ Says It All

WHEN KIM Kardashian is one of the most sanely dressed women at an event, something has definitely gone off the rails. Witness the Met Gala, the annual invite-only bash for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

Otherwise known as Halloween in May.

The gala is tonight, though red-carpet photos will be around into the next millennium, to the wonder of future generations. The 2019 theme is “Camp,” not as in sleeping bags and tents (though surely someone will show up wearing a sequined rucksack), but camp as in ironic, self-conscious, deliberate, exaggerated quotations of just about anything. The complete title of tonight’s gala is “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” a clever variation on the seminal 1964 essay by Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp.”

In a way, the theme is a kind of acknowledgment that the event is more about Costume and less about Fashion. True, major designers concoct outfits for their celeb clotheshorses (remember that old-fashioned term?), but the results are often off the charts—not in the haute couture sense of being a confection that few can wear and fewer can afford but in sense of . . . why?

The theme of last year’s gala was “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”—with cooperation from the Vatican! Catholic priests, on up the chain of command, get to wear the glittery stuff in real life while poor nuns seem condemned to matt black and white (though some of their headpieces are cute). So I might’ve expected dozens of Sicilian widows in black, but by now I knew better.

Interpretations of the theme were on the order of Ariana Grande wearing, essentially, the Sistine Chapel, those iconic images reproduced on the swooping skirts of her gown. And Katy Perry wearing Versace-as-Archangel-Gabriel with six-foot wings that countless ostriches must have laid down their lives for.*

And I haven’t yet mentioned Sarah Jessica Parker, who can always be counted on to push the apparel envelope. On her head she wore an entire shrine, topped with a big red Sacred Heart of Jesus. I couldn’t get close enough to tell if the jewel-encrusted headpiece was home to a Nativity scene or the Crucifixion. Given that her outfit was designed by those naughty Italian boys Dolce and Gabbana, either was possible.

However, I didn’t expect Jennifer Lopez showing less skin than usual (and Zoe Kravitz showing more than I thought possible and still be, technically, dressed). Or Rihanna decked out in a pearl-and-rhinestone-studded strapless mini dress, maxi coat—and bishop’s miter (you know, the pointy headpiece; the pope wears one too). The Holy Spirit in the form of a dove was hanging around her neck.

Wasn’t that camp enough for the powers-that-be at Vogue magazine, under whose auspices the gala gets wilder and wilder each year? Apparently not. But after perusing pictures from earlier galas, I suddenly thought, Maybe those editors were just trying to get women back into, you know, clothing, garments that embellish the body but also cover it up.

Put Hollywood and the fashion catwalk in the same room and there will always be a lot of skin on display—bared haunches, architecturally reengineered boobs, that sort of thing. It doesn’t help that most of the photogs who cover these events are men: Show enough skin and they’ll take your picture (from several angles) and put them out there. Bingo! Your fees just went up.

The 2015 gala was a real glitter-and-skin event, with Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian doing the nude netting thing, where the slightly more private parts are camouflaged by sequins or pearls or other forms of flash. Jennifer Lopez showed up with chains and a bared hip. That year the theme was “China: Through the Looking Glass,” but those women didn’t seem to notice. That was the year Rihanna displayed a brilliant yellow fur-trimmed couture outfit by Chinese designer Guo Pei, with an embroidered train that cascaded down the red-carpet stairs like a peacock’s fan. It was glorious, it was ridiculous, but at least it was a real garment and spoke of the Chinese influence the way the evening’s outfits had been invited to.

Please don’t misunderstand: The outfits are wonders of the needlework trade, glorious ideas no doubt painstakingly crafted. And yes, we all enjoy watching these rarefied creatures strut around (those who can move at all) in their finery. And again yes, these are the outliers; the majority of the female invitees are elegantly put together for the occasion. But those aren’t the images that burn new holes in our retinas, that make the ETV coverage.

In 2014 Kendall Jenner made her gala “debut” in an almost demure strapless champagne-color satin “corset dress” that hugged her body so tightly that she lay down in the car on the way to the Met because she couldn’t sit (she posted a selfie and said so, that’s how I know). Four short years later, in 2018, she went from total control to total exposure, plunging the back of her dress below the waist, the netting exposing her buttocks (buttocks to kill for, but still). Guess which dress got her more play. Oh, don’t even bother. Just turn on ETV at 7pm, or check out Vogue’s Facebook or Twitter feeds, and just enjoy the ridiculous splendor of this End Times bash.

—Nancy McKeon

*There are ways to collect feathers from ostriches that don’t involve killing the animals, but that’s not what happens at an industry level.

Roasted Broccoli to the Rescue

Panini with roasted broccoli. / Photo by Stephanie Witt Sedgwick.

This piece originally ran in 2017. Now seems the right moment for a reboot.

WHEN WE RUSH into the house late, or when I’m pressed for time, or just want dinner fast, I turn on the oven and line a rimmed sheet pan with heavy-duty aluminum foil. It’s gotten to the point that one of my nieces once asked me if I had an investment in an aluminum foil company. Not exactly, but I’ve come to appreciate how much I can cook on that one pan and how easy the clean-up is—perfect for weeknight dinners.

My current favorite is roasted broccoli. Roasting gives broccoli a nice hint of bitterness and a depth of flavor you don’t get from steaming. Better yet, it is so easy. You just cut the broccoli into whatever size florets you like; the smaller ones cook faster but also overcook faster so choose your size carefully. Toss with olive oil, salt and pepper, place on the foil-lined rimmed sheet pan and pop into an oven preheated to 375 degrees. After 15 minutes, I add thinly sliced garlic, which I have also tossed with olive oil and salt. (Note on the garlic: Always slice it when using it like this. If you chop it, it will cook too quickly and burn; if you leave the cloves whole, they won’t cook quickly enough.) I use tongs or a spatula to mix everything together and continue roasting the broccoli for an additional 7 to 15 minutes. How long you leave it in there depends on how you prefer the broccoli cooked. I like it more on the browned side, so a total of 30 minutes usually works, but if you like yours a little firmer, a total of 22 to 25 minutes should do it.

And then what? Here’s a few options:

Roasted Broccoli Side Dish: Remove the broccoli from the oven, sprinkle with fresh lemon juice and enjoy as a side dish. A little freshly grated Parmesan is nice here.

Pasta With Roasted Broccoli and Garlic: The original emergency meal! While the broccoli’s roasting, cook some pasta; I like shells but it’s up to you which shape you use. When the broccoli’s done, toss the broccoli, garlic and any oil from the pan with the drained pasta. Add additional olive oil if needed. Serve with lots of freshly grated Parmesan cheese and pepper.

Roasted Broccoli Panini: You have to try one of these panini: They are surprisingly delicious, with the slightly bitter broccoli (roasted with garlic as above) providing a perfect counterpoint to the rich melted cheese. For each sandwich, I brush one side of 2 slices of Italian bread or any country-style loaf (you can keep some in the freezer) with olive oil. The bread goes oiled side down on a cutting board. Next add a layer of sliced mozzarella cheese. Top this with a layer of the roasted broccoli, making sure to include a few slices of the roasted garlic. I put a few teaspoons of ricotta in between the broccoli pieces, then another layer of sliced mozzarella. Top with the remaining slice of bread, oil side up. If you have a panini machine, now’s the time to pull it out; if not, any griddle and a flat pot lid or heavy plate will do. Heat whichever pan you’re using and cook the way you would any grilled cheese sandwich. You can add a slice of prosciutto, salami or ham if you like things more substantial. The sandwich captures the spirit of a calzone but is much more fine-tuned, with a crispy bread exterior, a soft cheesy interior and a great punch of flavor from the broccoli and garlic.

—Stephanie Witt Sedgwick

Green Acre # 147: Impatient Am I!

One of Tarheel Nursery’s greenhouses. On the front, Tarheel’s fern room. / Photos by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

SOME YEARS I’m impatient with my garden. This is one of them.

I am not in a nurturing, cooing-over-the-seedlings mood. I want it all now.

We bought a truckload of stuff in Raleigh, North Carolina, on our Easter/Passover trip to visit Baby and her Personal Prince Pete (girl does a wicked Seder).

There are several excellent nurseries about half an hour out of town where you can pick up gorgeous trees and flowers—cheap. Tarheel Nursery in Angier, where we stopped this year, had flats of 28 flowers for $14. These were not the hardware-store squiggles and bits you can get in the city for $1.25 for an itty-bitty container but full-grown babies, pinched into proper bushiness and sporting plenty of blooms.

The greenhouses goggle the mind with $12 hanging baskets of flowers and greens so full and effervescent you’d need a hanging rack in the car to get them home without damage. There were hollyhocks densely packed with trumpets of color, snapdragons in psychedelic hues and fabulous elephant ears. There’s a greenhouse devoted to ferns.

One could go mad here, but exercised Great Restraint.

Baby and I picked bits of this and that from the floors, stuffing them in my shoulder bag. Most will root without much fuss, in water or with a little dip in rooting powder. I have high hopes for the bits of purloined tradescantia (wandering jew), a rare variety with tiers of fat, dark green leaves. These can be poked directly into pots or the soil and will, as always, go mad with happiness.

Among the greenhouse finds were hot pink zinnias (no seed attempts for me this year), those snapdragons and a purple clematis jackmanii already trailing long vines studded with flowers. I debated spending $5 each for the five sweet-potato vines that drip down the front of my window boxes each year in a fabulous ruffle and flourish. But these quart-size monsters were irresistible, having a quantity of foliage I don’t usually see until the tail end of June.

Speaking of the window boxes. I was so pleased with last year’s thought of rosemary for the upstairs display. Three sizable plants to anchor the center of each of the three boxes. A nice soaring sight visible from the sidewalk. Rosemary makes me sneeze, but what price beauty?

Those bushes did well the first winter, and frizzled the second. They had replaced various bouts of boxwood, azaleas (was that ever short-lived) and asparagus fern, which was a lovely thought though not as high as I’d hoped. In alternate years I’ve tried spikes, a variety of draceana that sends up, well, spikes of greenery perfect for a backdrop and supposed to be fairly cold-hardy. They would perform valiantly until, say, March. When unbelievably they bit the dust. Why would they hang on through blizzard and wind and at the first mild turn of events give up on me?

There were also a few years of fake things, like balls of Chinese plastic boxwood that looked fine from a distance. I reinstalled the fauxballs this spring, anchoring them on chopsticks so that they loft above the rest of the shrubbish, but they don’t have the splash I’m wanting.

The lower boxes are doing fine with their centers manned by some fake boxwood I found curbside last year. Particularly cunning these “plants” are, as they have some brownish leaves that make them look that much more real. Leave it to me to kill a fake plant.

Returning to the top tier. Yesterday the Prince and I trotted out to the Lowe’s home-improvement place and picked up two large pots of lavender, each holding two hefty plants and plenty of florets. They smell lovely. Certainly better than rosemary, and as they’re in the bedroom windows they might have the added benefit of putting us more restfully to sleep.

Maybe I’ll separate the plants and put them in smaller pots that will just sit in the rear of the window boxes. That will give them more soil, and a bit more lift. I do like me some drama in the boxes.

I do not expect the lavender plants to make it, but they should survive for a month or so. As they were My Prince’s whim, I can blame their demise on him. This is always satisfying.

We also bought a few spikes as back-up. I assume they’ll be necessary.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” does her best thinking and buying when she’s trying to outwit her garden.

Green Acre # 146: Let’s Go to the Tape

A carpet of color–not impossible! / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I DIDN’T START out as a scavenger.

My early childhood was split between an apartment in Manhattan and a house on Long Island, a beautiful acre or so maintained by gardeners. In my teens we moved to the city full time, but in those grammar school years the purr of lawnmowers and snip-snip of hedge clippers provided the background to afternoon naps.

There were rambling roses along the front fence that actually smelled like roses, a scent we’re now more likely to find in a bottle than a bush. There were flowering fruit trees and snowballs out front, and, in back, a rock garden was set into a slope. A Japanese garden with a weeping cherry was outside my sister Jeanie’s bedroom window, where shoji screens slid open to frame the view.

Everything was overseen by my dad, a furniture designer who looked a bit like Bill Blass. He ordered every aspect of our lives, from the gardens to the house, to the restaurants we ate in, to the vacations we took—to the suits and shirts and shoes he wore, all custom made by his tailor and his cobbler. We didn’t complain; it was pretty idyllic. It was the way he was raised.

I never had to make do.

Mom was raised with little, but was talented as well, a brilliant cook who also created big, blousy, wildly colored flower arrangements. But the only place around the house where she was allowed to exercise her creativity was a triangular patch of dirt near the swimming pool. I have no idea how she managed to negotiate such a prominent location—probably threatening to withhold something or other.

Each spring she’d turn the soil and lay down ribbons of white gauze infused with flower seeds: marigolds and zinnias and sunflowers in a mad clash of color spurting like fountains. Untamed and magical, it was my favorite space.

It was my mom who taught me how to create beauty, not buy it. Which came in handy when I ended up having more lust for beauty than cash. I can’t think otherwise anymore. Making something from little or nothing is far more fun.

Baby has taken that to heart. When she was a teenager she grumbled some, but as an adult she loves haunting thrift shops—and pinching a bit of this and that as she passes an interesting plant.

She’s in real estate in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she and her Personal Prince Pete have just moved into a house of their own design (runs in the family, see). When she sold her first house, that happy client dug up the flower beds and handed over a pair of lilac trees, some hydrangeas and climbing roses, a hardy gardenia, what appears to be a million irises and a couple of azaleas, most of which went into Baby’s small front garden.

The backyard is more problematic.

We were visiting for a few days last week and I was drinking my coffee and staring at the designated garden area, a never-turned stretch of hard-packed clay about 15 feet wide and 25 feet long, running beside the sodded lawn, a brilliantly green and lush ribbon extending to the back of the property. (I wish them luck with that).

In one of my Eureka! moments, I recalled a recent article in the New York Times about Milan’s furniture show, Salone del Mobile. Therein was a photo of a wildflower garden created by Belgian florist Mark Colle that reminded me of my mother’s pool-side plot. So ordered in its disorder, meticulously uncrafted, that it looked as if it had been laid with seed tapes.

Right.

Baby’s garden is a big space to fill, as she and Prince Pete are temporarily house poor. And given the lousy condition of their soil, trying to dig down more than an inch or so would be a brutal exercise for the muscles. However, even a quarter-inch of loose soil allows for laying out and covering these biodegradable rolls of seed, which are evenly spaced (as opposed to being tossed about higgledy-piggledy) and so do not need thinning as flowers emerge.

She could lay out stretches of tape, top with soil, water (a lot), and in just a few weeks there’ll be seedlings of alyssum, zinnias, mints, snapdragons, poppies, and what all.*

Oh, the flowers will grow, and the birds and butterflies will swoop and frolic, and I’ll do for them a Jules Feiffer happy dance (I have several of cartoonist Feiffer’s dances in my repertoire, suitable for various occasions).

Then, in my mind, I added a flourish of lettuce along the border’s edge, Boston perhaps, as a ruffly finishing touch, softening the line between flowers and lawn.

“They have bunnies, don’t they?” said My Prince, spoiler of fantasies. “Peter Rabbit, hop, hop, hop, little overalls, ha, ha, ha, chomp, chomp.”

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” gardens in her fantasies as well as IRL.

* Flower or seed tape can be ordered from Burpee Seed and Park Seed and assorted places like this on Amazon.com.

Picture This

This marble statue group of the Three Graces dates back to the 2nd century AD and is a Roman copy of a Greek work from the 2nd century BC. It’s in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A version of this article appeared first on Prime Women.

THE NEXT TIME you’re at the bathroom mirror and you pull back the skin along your jawline so you can actually see your former jawline, or the next time you take a hasty dressing-room selfie so you can see how bad those pants look Back There, ask yourself this: If I were a man would I be doing this?

I”m not a man so I can’t be 100 percent sure about this, but I’m willing to bet that most members of the other sex (to be binary for a moment) don’t spend all that much time beating themselves up over the way they look. Take me as I am, I imagine them thinking as they run their fingers through hair still wet from the shower. Gray at the temples? Distinguished. Crinkles around the eyes? Craggy and lived-in. We know this. None of this is news. And yet.

It’s been 41, count ’em 41, years since publication of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, the 1978 blockbuster by British psychotherapist Susie Orbach. The deference shown, Orbach argued, by women and girls to judgment by the culture at large, vis-à-vis fat and other factors, has severely curtailed their—our—autonomy and encouraged us to live under constant threat of rejection. All of which has led to an unhealthy relationship with food, whether over-dieting or overeating, and a vast ongoing dissatisfaction with our own bodies. Forty-one years. Yet here we are, still.

There’s a delicious bit in one of the early episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the Amazon web series set in the 1950s. In it we learn that Mrs. Maisel’s mom is in the habit of sneaking out of bed before dawn to put on fresh makeup—just so her husband can express awe at how sparkly and fresh she looks even in the morning.

Did that really happen in the ’50s? Probably not, yet there’s no doubt a kernel of truth to it. (How many of us watched and thought, Wow, I should have thought of that!?)

Anyway, the message seems to be that while men are still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, here we are, the other half of humanity, pinned to the board like some butterfly specimen, just waiting . . . to be looked at? admired? judged?

It’s a common complaint that advertising and “the media” at large have exacerbated the situation, using images of impossibly unblemished exemplars of female beauty to flog everything from toilet paper to $5,000 handbags. And they are certainly guilty as charged, leading a lot of us to wish we could Photoshop ourselves in real life.

But even female celebs noted for their brains as well as their beauty aren’t quite good enough sometimes. There was a before-and-after example in 2006 of a promotional photo shoot featuring TV’s cute little Katie Couric. But not little enough, apparently. The original image showed how the final picture had nipped in Couric’s waist, jussssst a little bit.

I spied another example a couple of years ago, one that I found touching at the same time it was arguably disrespectful. It was a YouTube video of the singer Adele backstage greeting admirers. Adele has famously announced that she would never be one of those Twiggy girls, yet here she was, looking more svelte than she had in her earlier days. But it seemed not good enough for the fan whose camera we were viewing her through. After he centered the singer in his lens, he adjusted something that elongated the image upward, making Adele ever so slightly taller and slimmer, more Modigliani than Botero.

I like to think the fan-photographer adjusted the picture out of admiration for Adele: In my mind, he wanted her to look as close to “ideal” as possible. Nonetheless, in this one private act, it was the real Adele who was declared less than acceptable.

Is there any progress at all in body acceptance? Well, Unilever’s Dove soap has been championing Real Beauty with ads that use women with various (to a certain extent) body shapes since 2004. Dove re-upped its commitment in 2017, pledging to use no models and no digital distortion or manipulation of images. The brand now featuring “civilians” of different sizes, races and, perhaps the ultimate no-no, ages. Apparently women with gray or white hair are also allowed to wash with Dove.

Last fall, the five-year-old buzzy online maker of ThirdLove bras commandeered an entire page of the New York Times to rip Victoria’s Secret’s whole focus as playing to the male gaze. In February the lingerie newcomer upped the ante by increasing its offerings to 78 bra sizes and showing pictures of 78 women in their undies. This was the ad where the rubber met the road, as the old slogan goes. Here were billowing breasts and bellies hanging over the waistband of bikini panties; some arms were as plump as dachshunds, others showed bony elbows. One woman had a prosthetic arm. Real women, and presumably one brave veteran, in other words.

As ThirdLove co-founder Heidi Zak told the CEO of Victoria’s Secret in the Times ad, “It’s time to stop telling women what makes them sexy—let us decide.”

But there’s a problem with that. Only last week the Prime Women website spotted and re-posted a Facebook photo of a shapely woman standing in the surf, grinning with delight in her black bikini. Lovely-looking woman, healthy and fit.

So what was the reaction from Prime Women readers? There were admirers, of course, who celebrated the spirit of the woman in the photo. But some other posters were vicious and came at the image from all sides.

Suggesting that the woman’s figure wasn’t quite up to par, one poster snapped that the picture had been Photoshopped and the woman was “definitely holding her gut in.” (Gee, in that setting so would I!) Another decried running a bikini picture at all, thereby perpetuating the myth of ideal beauty. Another wanted instead to see women who were “using the last decades of their life to make a difference.” (For all we know, that woman is the head of a nonprofit fighting domestic abuse. She also likes to go to the beach.)

The vehemence of the reactions shouldn’t be a surprise: If fat was, and is, a feminist issue, so are fitness, beauty and all the messages we suspect are lurking behind a simple holiday snapshot. It took a long, long time for our culture to put us in this position—the Three Graces sculpture from 2nd-century-BC Greece comes to mind. It’s going to take a lot more than Dove soap to clean it all up.

—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.

Green Acre #145: Embrace the Season

A small front yard can pack a big punch with a springtime display like this one. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

SOMETIMES YOU come across a scene that makes you catch your breath, and you realize it’s such an easy thing to copy.

This is how I felt catching sight last weekend of a tiny front yard in front of a neighborhood row house, densely packed with a mix of salmon and buttercup-yellow tulips. A red-leaf maple was the only other ornament. A tiny front yard helps in this matter—less turning, fewer bulbs.

All you need is a strong arm, or a strong arm you can borrow or cajole into turning the soil, a great deal of soil, but then it’s not your arm.* Lasagne helps, I’ve found, though you have to make your own pasta. You also need a few bags of tulips. They needn’t be exotic: Costco bulbs will do—40 bucks and you have a masterpiece.

Of course the display is ephemeral. A few warm days and the flowers go poof. But with the weather chilling down just as the tulips lofted their lovely heads, this sight should extend for a joyful week or so. Many pieces of luck were and are involved.

From pink canopy to pink carpet. So goes life with a Kwanzan cherry. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

As in: It’s also good to have a railing around the garden as a big-footed postal person, or some such, would certainly tromp across the bulbs as they emerged, ruining the display.

When the flowers fade and fall, I hope the tulips will be yanked and disposed of, leaving a blank canvas for a summer show. I wouldn’t bother trying to save the bulbs; they look like dreck as they wither, and the chance of them returning is beyond iffy.

Next year will be easier, if these gardeners choose to repeat the performance. The soil will have been prepared so the new bulbs can be planted with a trowel. Pleading arthritic fingers and offering another lasagne might bring more semi-willing assistance.

This tulip display reminds me of another I saw a decade or so ago. A long narrow garden leading to a row house the color of a hacienda roof, a delicious pinkish red. The tulips were planted so densely the green of the leaves wasn’t visible. It was a visual swoop, drawing the eye from the retaining wall at the sidewalk across the yard and up the front of the house, as if the facade were reflected in a rippling mirror.

The homeowners never did it again, such a pity.

Spring came in a little too fast for me this year. I am shocked that the roses are already budded. Our long-ago neighbor, an old codger named Bob, told me the roses always start to bloom around here on Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May, if you need reminding, and for years that was so. Until this year—30-odd years on—when everything has been nearly a month earlier than usual.

I would have liked to appreciate the daffodils for just a few more days. But I’m pleased no real cold snap came along to nip the hydrangeas, among my favorite flowers.

It’s been so warm that I checked the weather forecast last week and, finding no warning of anything approaching a freeze, I gave in to My Prince and allowed the toting of the tropicals outside to their summer home, although they’re huddled in groups in corners so the pansies and tulips—and soon the allium, which border the little pond—can be rightly appreciated.

So far so good—though there was one year when we had a light snow on April 21st. This year the only snow I see are the flurries of delicate pink petals drifting across the back garden from the Kwanzan cherry, a 30-foot-tall tree that spreads its massive limbs like a fabulous garden umbrella.

Chag Pesach samech, a joyous Easter, and a happy, peaceful Spring to all.

Now, onward to summer.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

*Baby pointed out a great gift for the handyperson around the house, a bulb auger attachment for your electric drill. Now that’s a cool tool for planting a field of tulips, or any bulbs, in untilled soil.

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” embraces spring flowers as much as she can, wherever she can.

Green Acre #144: Cherry, Ho!

This is the Kwanzan cherry tree in the Washington DC garden of “Stephanie Gardens.” It’s about 80 percent of the way to full bloom. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Washington isn’t the only place with cherry trees in blossom. For a guide to blooms in New York City, go to this guide from Curbed.com. For Pittsburgh, see The Incline. And for Philadelphia, go to Visit Philly.

MY BRITISH FRIEND Maggie and I were having coffee on the sidewalk at Radici, the little Italian market and café on Washington DC’s Capitol Hill, when a bunch of teenage girls with sunburned faces and artfully ripped jeans ambled by looking this way and that.

“Where’s Georgetown Cupcakes?” the group’s ringleader asked us as the others turned in giggling circles.

“In Georgetown,” I said, since I was busy being curmudgeonly that day.

I was once asked directions in Rome, by a map-waving family who sounded like neighbors of Bruce Springsteen’s. Summoning my broadest New York, I said, “Sorry, I don’t speak English,” then pointed to My Prince, who was dithering about on the Spanish Steps, and said, “Go ask him, I think he does.”

“Grazie, grazie,” the family chorused as they scurried off. Heh. Snicker. That was an aside.

Maggie, on the other hand, loves giving advice, directions and orders, delighting in the way Americans jump

Cherry trees in bloom at the National Arboretum in Washington DC. It would be a fairyland if not for all the people! / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

when they hear her magisterial voice, the sort, as you know, that is used to sell everything from fancy cars to Orbit gum to Poo-Pourri, a spray that destinks your bathroom. If the Brits say it, best hop to it.

She pointed imperiously (as she does) across the street to Eastern Market, where among the various food stalls is a bakery. “You can get fine cupcakes right over there,” she informed them.

But even Maggie couldn’t sell this. “We want Georgetown Cupcakes, the place from the TV show,” the leader of the pack insisted. So we told them how to get to the little shop where similarly obsessed tourists line up for an hour, just to say they’ve been.

Which brings us, once again, to the cherry blossoms. For tourists there is no place to see them other than the Tidal Basin, despite being scarcely able to see the trees for the gawkers and there being many other places around town with spectacular displays.

Among the tourists last weekend were my niece Alexandra, her husband Nic, and their two kids, 5-year-old Cole and 7-month-old Lexi, who were visiting from Denver. While I said that it was going to be some schlep between Metro and walking to the trees with two little kids, she insisted that’s where they had to be.

Notice that I did not offer to go along.

Did I mention people . . . and cars? But the Arboretum in Washington DC is still a treat, less crowded and with a greater variety of cherry trees than at the Tidal Basin. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Instead, My Prince and I headed to the 446-acre National Arboretum in Northeast DC, where there are 76 varieties of cherry, 64 more than at the Tidal Basin. Inaccessible by Metro, which takes care of most tourists, and hard by the intersection of Bladensburg Road and New York Avenue NE, an area that has always struck fear in the hearts of residents of Washington’s more genteel neighborhoods, making it a delightfully tranquil place to take in the trees.

Sadly, like just about every other place else in Washington, the arboretum has become trendy. How many articles have I read in the past week urging folks to go to this “secret place,” where you could breathe in the tranquillity and picnic in peaceful pastures.

Oh, please . . .

The result was jammed parking lots and roadside shoulders, with rent-a-cops directing traffic and hordes of walkers, bikers, dogs and kids. It was like bovine herds milling around in front of our 30-year-old Mustang convertible, our lazy touring car.

I suppose this is good for the health of the Arboretum, with a probable flush of new supporters and gardening enthusiasts—and their donations. Sigh.

Don’t tell anyone, but while the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin will probably be done by this weekend, the sensational Kwanzans, with their bravura display of cotton-candy flower balls, and several dozen other fine varieties will just be beginning to explode in the Arboretum’s groves.

Next up the azaleas. And if you think you’ve seen azaleas . . .

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” will travel miles, well, at least a few blocks, to see marvelous flowers.

Green Acre #143: Spring’s a-Poppin’

CHERRY BLOSSOMS at the Tidal Basin in Washington DC? Crowds give me hives. If you’re equally averse to screaming children and hordes of selfie-takers backing up over your flip-flops, may I suggest Stanton Park* on Capitol Hill, which is ringed with trees in full flower. You can even snag a bench or lie in the grass and day-dream without being trampled by a tourist.

The trees are particularly spectacular this year, and longer-lasting than usual thanks to the early warm snap that brought out the blooms last weekend, followed by a wintry blast that put us back into our minks but is preserving the blossoms just like putting them in a florist’s refrigerator.

Cherry trees are not all that’s in bloom right now. I’ve never been into orchids; they remind me of little old ladies, teenage girls headed for the prom, and glam staging devices for real estate agents trying to wring an extra hundred thou out of a listing.

That said. The orchid show on view till the end of the month in the utterly peaceful Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery is enough to twist my mind.

There are itty-bitty specimens whose curious faces poke up amid greenery, cascades of blooms dripping from towering vases, waves of color—from purest white to muted purples and greens to LOOK AT ME shrieks of shocking pink and mad combinations—like fantastical butterflies.

There are four large sections, one in each corner, divided by variety and habitat and arranged with a brilliant eye to naturalistic design—meaning, within a garden, not stationed on the credenza.

Let me tell you, I was in full lust. While usually most captivated by bombast, I was completely enchanted by a collection of wee paphiopedilums, or slipper orchids, which here resemble candy-colored alien sprites nestled in moss and set amid palm leaves. Could I do something like this near my little pond?

I hesitate.

While orchid flowers can last for several months, when the bloom is spent you have a pretty ugly plant with a stick in the middle for as much as a year—and in my experience, forever. How many people do you know nurturing a few droopy leaves in plastic pots lined forlornly along a kitchen window?

A friend who recently passed away had 20 such pots lined up along a wall. She died before they rebloomed. Is there anything sadder? Well, yes, I suppose. But you get the picture.

You can toss orchids out, of course, and buy new ones. Trader Joe’s often has them for around $15 in various sizes and sometimes charming combinations of hues. You can buy seeds of the more exotic sorts pretty cheaply—around $8 for 100. I wish you health and long life. Buying the unusual and exotic can rapidly escalate from $50. A single Shenzhen Nongke Orchid, which happened not to be on display, rings in at about $200,000.

The gorgeous show, the 24th annual annual exhibit by the US Botanic Garden and the Smithsonian, which was almost too much to take in, made me thirsty. Warning! A small bottle of water is $4 at the kiosk. Out on the sidewalk you’ll probably fall over a vendor offering the same for a buck. Save the difference, buy an orchid.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” is turning into an equal-opportunity flower lover.

Orchids: Amazing Adaptations. A joint collaboration of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Gardens and the US Botanic Garden. Free, through April 28, 2019.

* Stanton Park is just a 10-minute walk from Washington’s Union Station and the US Capitol. If you stroll along Massachusetts Avenue NE to get there, a number of restaurants sport delightful outdoor cafes. Bistro Cacao is a particular favorite for weekend brunch. Despite being in eyeshot of the Capitol dome, a meal on the tented patio feels like a little vacation.

Protein Bowl? Chef Salad? You Decide.

A Moving Story

Green Acre #142: Read It and Reap

AS WINTER FOLDS into spring, the eye is starved for color, the nose twitches for beguiling scents, and the lust for fresh home and garden inspiration grows.

Living Floral, Entertaining and Decorating With Flowers by Margot Shaw, editor-in-chief of Flower magazine, celebrates the seasons with abundant tips from the supremely cultivated sensibilities of a cornucopia of Southern-bred designers and artists.

Some are well known, like interior designer and masterful gardener Charlotte Moss, who provides the introduction and flamboyant Renny Reynolds and his partner Jack Staub, whose South Florida home and garden go right over the top.

This is one of those wonderful Rizzoli coffee-table titles, swooning with color and ideas, that are terrific host/ess gifts and also perfectly timed for Mother’s Day. Rizzoli never fails to delight.

Whether the subject is living in New Orleans, Los Angeles or the Hamptons, easy Southern living and hospitality inform each chapter—particularly helpful for those who are new to entertaining or obsessive about preserving their fine things.

Stop fretting over fragile china—accept the fact that things will break, and enjoy them until then. White linens will be doused in red wine, and dog hairs will be on the sofa, and so what about that door that’s still missing in the kitchen (that last would be me). Guests are not there to pick over your home, they’re there because they like you and want to have fun (at least we hope so).

As Staub and Reynolds put it: “ . . . if the soufflé falls or the power goes out, just laugh and your guests will too—order pizza and light more candles . . . ”

These are wonderful homes, filled with fabulous things, and gardens that have taken years and hefty wallets to create. But it doesn’t require cash to develop panache. Take your cue from event planner Mindy Rice and create a tablescape of rocks, feathers and jars. Or march a row of tiny vases with single stems down the tabletop.

Worry not about being matchy-matchy—charm lies in the odd bits. Thanks to clean-up queen Marie Kondo urging people to toss out the things they don’t regularly use, thrift shops have an abundance of treasures with which the rest of us can play. There are napkins and tablecloths and whimsical objects to be found—glassware cheap enough to smash in the fireplace, should you wish to make a grand gesture.

No flowers? Heap shiny red apples in a bowl or pluck a large leaf or three from the philodendron and stick it in a vase.

You don’t have a vase? Do as MyLittleBird managing editor Nancy McKeon did: Having recently

moved to a new apartment in New York, coming home with a bunch of flowers she realized the vases were still packed, so she plunked the flowers into the powder-room toilet tank, which, of course, is always filled with fresh, clean, cool water perfect for those thirsty stems.

No, that’s not a tip from the book, but is it brilliant or what? And the water is automatically changed with every flush!

When LittleBird “Stephanie Gardens” isn’t entertaining using her own plants and flowers, she is picking up tips from the extravagant ideas of others.

Scents and Sensibility

COMPARED WITH the perfume bottles on exhibit at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, our current-day flacons, even the most whimsical ones, are plain Janes. Imagine your favorite scent being contained in a little porcelain figure of a monk or a country maiden, or even the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.

Hillwood’s “Perfume & Seduction” certainly seduced me. All of a sudden those dreadful little figurines people collect seem charming, not gauche. Well, almost. The display here of genre figures—typical characters of a town, just as you might find in a crèche scene—date from the 18th century and have the workmanship to prove it.

If the perfume holders are special—made of enameled gold or copper, glass, porcelain, hardstones such as agate and bloodstone—the people they were intended for were the special people of the day, starting with the men and women who frequented the court of Louis XIV. Lesser folks could not have afforded to commission such works.

Lesser folks may not even have imagined such things existed. Or perhaps when they saw a wealthy gentleman passing by holding a vinegar-filled vinaigrette to his nose they might note how the fancy folks couldn’t stand the stench of the world at large. (Nor might we Americans, who have banished smell from just about everywhere. Been to a supermarket lately? Does it smell like food? God forbid. It smells mostly of, well, not much. But on balance, today’s lack of smells is better than the raw sewage, rotting garbage, tanneries and abattoirs that gave Paris her heady 18th-century fragrance.)

Today fragrance can be a final touch before a man or woman marches off to the theater. Roll back the calendar a few hundred years, though, and it had a bigger role as the wealthy developed a new preoccupation with personal hygiene. What now seems like a grace note may then have been a saving grace.

The little Dacha and the Adirondack Building on the Hillwood grounds are the perfect environments for exhibiting small, precious items. An exhibit in 2015 of the jewelry Pierre Cartier and Post collaborated on was held in the Adirondack; “Perfume” is housed in the Dacha.

There’s an associated show-and-smell exhibit at Hillwood. Turn right inside the Greenhouse and you get glorious orchids, those showoffs; turn left and you can tour many of the plants and flowers that go into making perfumes and flavorings. There are the usual suspects—lavender, vanilla, gardenia, jasmine, cinnamon, rosemary and Provence roses—but nature isn’t quite as cooperative with curators as inanimate objects are: Most of the plants are not in bloom right now. Still, I learned that about 8,000 jasmine blooms render less than a teaspoon of essential oil and that about 75 percent of all perfumes use roses as a floral note. A sign stated that the Provence rose is intensely scented and therefore much in demand, but honestly the one or two blossoms didn’t smell that strong to me, even when I poked my nose in one.

I also learned that potpourri consisted of a mixture of dried flowers and was devised in Paris in the late 1600s, long before it migrated to every overdressed B&B in America in the 1980s. Actually, 18th-century European aristocrats would probably approve: They placed potpourri on tables and mantels, burned incense and aromatic pastilles, carried vinaigrettes. I don’t know about the seductive powers of perfume, but I do know they make for a better-smelling world.

Perfume & Seduction, Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, 4155 Linnean Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008; 202-686-5807; hillwood museum.org. The exhibit runs through June 9, 2019. Tickets are $18 ($15 for those 65 and older).