Yellow and white peonies in full blousy bloom at the National Arboretum. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

AMERICAN YELLOWWOOD. I’m expecting to be tripping over this tree constantly now. You know how it goes? You’ve never heard of something fabulous and suddenly it’s everywhere, often to the point of never wanting to see another one again.

The prequel. My Prince and I went to the National Arboretum on Sunday and engaged in one of our usual exhausting tête-à-têtes, here in abbreviated form:

“What’s that?” he said, pointing at a white azalea, of which there are approximately 432,000 in bloom in the arboretum, never mind the city.

“An azalea.”

“And that?”

“Another azalea.”

“One’s white and one’s pink?”

“Yes.”

“What’s that?”

“An azalea.”

“It’s purple.”

“Yes. This is the azalea garden.”

I’m not getting around too easily, so these comments are being exchanged from the sagging seats of our almost entirely yellow 1987 Mustang convertible, which looks most respectable with the top down. It’s even sportier at high speeds, when the bits of original red paint flash by like sprightly exclamation points, or blood spray. Close observation is not our car’s friend.

The yellowwood tree calls for a splendid picnic in the Arboretum’s rose garden. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

We’re driving because there’s a hip replacement in my near future, a remarkably abrupt disability. There I was, hopping around Havana in late January; now I’m hobbling around with a cane—though I use it, in part, to maximize the drama of my condition. It is also useful for pointing, general gesturing and swiping at the shins of youth, who no longer notice me. Are you at that point yet? No? You will be.

The Prince does not like the cane. It makes him feel old. Him. Old.

We’re also driving because there’s nowhere convenient to park. It’s stupid visiting this place on a Sunday, if you have an option. Eventually we found a spot, reasonably close to the visitor’s center, where yellow and white peonies like blousy daisies nod their heads in a sunny border and the roses, always a destination this time of year, are not too far away. While they’re not yet at their peak—give it another week—those in bloom are heavenly; their scent mingles most delightfully with big pots of citrus: orange and lime and clamondin—a hybrid that falls somewhere between a mandarin orange and a kumquat. All are heavy with both fruit and flower.

While I was sniffing at one such, I looked up and froze. Hovering above me was what looked like a massive white wisteria tree, completely covered with panicles exuding a delightfully soft fragrance— if it were any stronger, one (meaning me) would pass out.

“Yellowwood,” was engraved on the little sign at its base. Have you ever heard of it? As I said earlier, I haven’t, though they’re apparently common as dirt further south.

It’s the kind of tree that demands a picnic beneath its panicles. But not your peanut butter-and-jelly-and-a can-of-Pringles-tossed-in-a-plastic-bag-from-Safeway kind of picnic. Oh no, this is your Dean & Deluca kind of picnic, requiring a woven basket of the sort you strap on the back of your roadster. For $128, plus wine, of course, they have such a one, stuffed with prosciutto, Italian salami, Purple Haze chevre and coconut cashews, among other delicacies.

This feast should, of course, be laid out on a proper blanket, perhaps a white antique cotton popcorn bedspread, with fringes around the edges. I have one which I’m willing to part with for $399.99.

If you have a spot for such a tree, I’d suggest you plant it. I do not, but I know who does. I immediately alerted Baby who has a properly scaled dirt patch to the right of her deck in Raleigh, land of the fried Ho Hos. And she replied, “I’ve seen these! I emailed you last year when I discovered one in Asheville! Oh man, want want want.”

Okay, so, I wasn’t paying proper attention.

Casey Trees, a D.C.-based nonprofit, with the mission to “restore, enhance and protect the tree canopy of the nation’s capital” says, rather gracelessly, that the yellowwood “is recognized as having one of the best flowering displays of flowering trees with its white or pink drooping flowers. Although rare in the wild, the yellowwood is hardy and can easily be an urban ornamental tree as it tolerates a wide range of acidic and slightly alkaline soils.” It can grow 60-80 feet tall, which is apparently medium-sized somewhere else. Consider yourself warned.

They are pricey. The 6-foot to 8-foot trees I’ve come across, in my admittedly brief research, are more than $300. However, planting a yellowwood in DC qualifies for a rebate of up to $100 from Casey Trees, one of the few bargains to be had in this city. A host of other trees also qualify—we got a rebate on a red leaf maple a few years ago.

By the way, the arboretum keeps a calendar of monthly highlights on its website. Besides the yellowwood, the trees and plants that are in bloom right now are said to include rhododendrons, azaleas, flowering dogwoods, crabapples, late-flowering cherries, Japanese-quince, Asian magnolia, woodland wildflowers, tree peonies, lilacs, dove-tree, species roses and spring-blooming camellias.

I suspect that, with this early heat, the lilacs are about over—but if they’re not, the arboretum’s collection is truly one of the greatest shows on earth.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh
Gardener Cavanaugh won’t let a silly hip issue get in the way of her enjoying spring planting.  To read more of her columns, click here.

Wisteria galloping across a roofline. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THE HOUSE SMELLS  delirious. Flowers blend into a Jo Malone concoction: rosemary, lavender, wisteria, geranium, with a faint underwhiff of dirt filtering through the open windows, filling the house with fragrance. A hint of dirt is a thing, you know, in your costlier, more complex, fragrances.

I’m a little surprised at this pungent kaleidoscope, as the day is chill and damp, not the humid warmth I expect we need to cajole such a lavish bouquet.

The rosemary is doing well in the upper window boxes; there are three across the front of the house. I planted it with some hesitation, late last summer, when my latest notion for a permanent centerpiece had flopped, as usual. While rosemary survives in our gardens, remaining green through the winter, always a plus, the shallower depth of window boxes presents a challenge when the temperature dips below freezing for a stretch. And rosemary can be overpowering, perhaps too much so for a bedroom window.

Don Juan climbing rose and mock orange blossoms create a natural bouquet. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Now pushing two feet tall—really making a statement up there—they turned out to be surprisingly mild, and handy for a stew or two. So I was planning to add a few more to the lower boxes this spring but, as these things happen, while poking about a garden center on Sunday, the Prince and I were gob smacked by a French lavender of particular allure. Rather costly, I thought, at $9 for the pot. But it was large enough to split, which I did, whacking the hard root in two. It’s doing quite nicely.

I’ve gotten surprisingly good at dividing and propagating, but that’s a story for another week.

We also bought sweet potato vines for the box fronts, lovely acid green ruffles that cascade over the boxes and drop, reaching the tops of the lower windows by August. These obscure the fact that some of the geraniums, so cheerfully pink, are fake. This is, as I’ve said at least once before, a neat trick, a floral trompe l’oeil that delights the eye—but only if done subtly, just a few frilly pops of artifice mixed into an honest display of flowers and greens.

So the fragrant lavender floats up to billow around the rosemary, a delightful pairing, and mingles with our neighbor’s wisteria, a massive thing that drifts along her roofline in a flotilla of purple blossoms so voluminous it could threaten North Korea. Hers is the right sort of wisteria (Japanese), as opposed to our wrong sort (Chinese), which howls at us from the depths of the garden, throwing off a meager scentless bloom or two each year—hidden within mountainous foliage. If you’re going to put up with this malicious, highly invasive monster that strangles anything in its path, it should at least bring a sweet-smelling spring flower show. You’ve been warned.

Threading it all together is the absolutely intoxicating scent of the mock orange that blooms beside the pond. I’ve snipped sprigs and branches for vases, scattered about the house, so I can stop here and there and close my eyes and drift.

It all clips by so fast, these April scents. But soon the Don Juan rose that clambers up the back porch railings will be in blood-red bloom, and the honeysuckle that smothers the back fence will add its syrupy note. I don’t like to go anywhere for long this time of year; sitting still and sniffing is such pleasure.

If you’d like to explore scented gardens, the Prince bought me a delicious little book several years ago: Fragrant Designs, from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. There are plants perfect for evening, for the yard and for containers; the needs of each, and growing tips. The reading is almost as tasty as the sniffing.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh
 To read previous columns of our unstoppable urban gardener, search for Green Acre in the Search box at the top of the screen.

Above, a neighbor’s Datura in full flower. It’s also called Angel’s Trumpet, either because it’s so beautiful or because it’s so deadly, Datura was the poison du jour in Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I AM A NEW MEMBER of the American Horticultural Society. While this sounds impressive, it’s no big deal. Just give them $35 (or more if you’re so moved) and they send you a membership card that you can stick in your wallet. In my case,  the card will immediately fall out and be ink-stained and sticky with jelly bean guts and various other substances that mysteriously lurk in the bottom of my bag, which is neither here nor there, just saying.

The Society’s website says that membership entitles you to a subscription to The American Gardener magazine, discounts at 300 public gardens throughout North America and the Cayman Islands (which I think needs explanation, if not exploration), online member resources, the annual seed exchange and special events.

This weekend is the annual plant fair at the Society’s headquarters, River Farm in Mount Vernon, a 25-acre spread that was once part of George Washington’s estate. The sale, which will include plants and tools, is open to all from noon to 4pm on Friday (with a 10am opening for members), and 10am to 4pm on Saturday. I’m hoping The Prince can be coerced into driving me, as we’ll need to bring the truck for all the completely unnecessary plants I’ll want to buy. I do not have space for one more. . . .

Meanwhile, my first issue of The American Gardener arrived yesterday. It is marked March/April and has articles on small trees and fast-growing vines, which certainly should appeal to a city gardener hungering for a little patch of shade and quick cover for a trellis or wall. While the tree tips are still handy, one finds that one should have started planting vine seeds 6 to 8 weeks before the last frost date, which happens to be April 21 around here. And not one of the wildly beautiful vines featured cares for shade, which is my garden’s most prominent attribute.

Perusing the website, between rounds of Candy Crush—I am now at level 1820 and hate to think of how much of my life has been spent getting there—I notice the section for freelance submissions to the magazine and am appalled to find myself woefully unqualified. For someone who writes about gardens, I really know nothing about nothing.

Among the “topics of particular interest” that they enjoy publishing:

Profiles of individual plant groups. I have knowledge of several, but I doubt they’d be interested in how I’ve gone wrong with them.

There are the various lilies that I planted for decades in too much shade. These, I can firmly state, will grow very tall (if they grow at all) and throw off a few flowers and then sit there cluttering a wee shade garden with their twiggish stems, which is an exceptionally boring sight. As is still the case with several other of my miscreant plants, once the flowers were spent I’d wire on “silk” lilies, which were perky all season, if scentless.

The wandering jew? Tradescantia pallid, and its ilk—some are purple, some striped with green, and so on—is so handy for filling spaces where something else has died. Stick your finger in the soil, insert a bit of stem, and water or don’t. They grow like weeds. (If you wander through a garden center, chances are you’ll find a bit of one broken off on the ground. Stick it in your pocket, break it any which way into inch-long sticks, put them in a pot and you’ll have a plant in about a week.)

Mock orange. There are, apparently, 60 varieties of this mammoth shrub, which doesn’t fruit (which is why it’s called “mock”) but does blossom in springtime with hundreds of small white flowers that one hopes smell sweet. I have found you can’t necessarily trust the grower on that last. I planted three before I found one with the honeyed memory I was seeking. Can’t tell you which it is, though, since I lost the tag.

Innovative approaches to garden design. I doubt they’d be interested in my fake flowers, amusing pots and statuary, laser lighting and other tricks I employ to obscure my failures.

Plant research. Well, this I do, and then I ignore the advice, which is why I have so many furiously invasive vines and miserably lanky climbing roses. Plant hunting is a subset of this category, and this I also do; each year buying a number of irresistible plants that I know from my research are doomed.

Plant conservation and biodiversity. My weeds grow like weeds—does that count?

Environmentally appropriate gardening. Snicker. Let us parse the term “environmentally appropriate.”

People-plant relationships (horticultural therapy, ethnobotany, community gardening). I have a relationship with my plants. It is no longer a soothing one, if it ever was. I am now thinking of a condo in Florida, where I sit on a terrace and watch the ocean, which needs no help from me. The thought of community gardening makes me itch. Spell-check does not like ethnobotony, by the way. [Stephanie: That’s cuz it’s ethnobotAny! You’re welcome.] I don’t either. Doesn’t the word have a racist reverberation? Where is this magazine published, anyway?

Plant literature and lore. Yes, well,  I’m always on the lookout for literature that provides disaster-distraction tips; this seems, however, a doubtful topic for this audience. Lore? What does this even mean? How to poison your spouse, as Agatha Christie might, with a lovely datura? That, I suppose I could write about. . . .

They’re also looking for articles that illustrate useful gardening techniques such as “grafting, pollarding, or propagation.”  Right.

One wonders why I write about gardens, not just once, but every week for, as of today, 50 weeks. And that’s only for Birdy here. I have been foisting my floral incompetence on whoever would have me for the last 25 or so years, and expect I’ll continue. I sure wish someone would send me to a spa in Bali or something.

Meanwhile, I’m going to Virginia this weekend and buying a plant, maybe two.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh
LittleBird Stephanie does keep writing about gardening; we just can’t stop her. To read previous columns, search for Green Acre in the Search box at the top of the screen.

THE AIR IN HAVANA is sweet on Thursdays, laundry day. The scent of fabric softener from sheets flapping on lines strung across balconies and streets overwhelms the malaise of diesel exhaust from the candy-colored 1950s cars and various claptrap, pasted-together vehicles that tootle about the narrow streets. They are, these cars, just as fantastic as you’ve heard.

If I were to go to Havana again, instead of pants I’d pack a skirt. Something swinging, colorful, sparkling with sequins that would swish along in time to the beat of the streets and catch the sun. Hola! I’d echo the call of the people I met; Trump he loco! which is invariably the second thing said. Si, si, Trump he loco.

They may not have much, but they do have cable TV, Florida stations overdubbed in Spanish, so we non-Spanish speakers  know something important is happening, like Chuck Schumer is weeping, but we’re not sure exactly why. Commercials are untouched, in English, delivered without irony. Cheerios, Crest smiles, Shield your home, the Slomin shield. Dial 1-800-alarm me.

This winter, The Prince and I flew to Havana to celebrate a Rather Large Birthday. His.

I’d been trying for months to pin him down on where he’d like to go, to wallow in his sorrow at another decade passed with no switchplate in the upstairs hallway. Oh wait, that’s my wallow.

It was difficult to hoist him out of this year’s funk; you know, those drumbeats of approaching death thrum more loudly as the years go galumphing by.

I dangled Paris, Cuba, Amsterdam, Cuba, the moors of Yorkshire, Cuba, Quebec. . . . We were at Banana Café, which happens to be a Cuban restaurant on Capitol Hill, scarfing down carnitas and awash in margaritas, when he had a Eureka! moment. “Let’s go to Cuba,” he said.

I suppose it’s clear that I encouraged this. Old cars, older buildings, the ocean. What better time than now, when Havana is on the verge of being: a) destroyed by swarms of obese American families in their matching plaid shorts searching for Starbucks in the land of café cubano; b) dropped back behind a rusted curtain by our fercocked administration; or c)  closed off  to us by their fercocked administration, because of our fercocked administration. Fercocked being Yiddish for, I’ll let you guess what it means. And you’re right!

Anyway, I sighed with relief that a decision had finally been made. Have I mentioned that this was less than two weeks before his birthday? And that he did not want to go with a tour, waddling along like obedient duckies behind a leader, possibly with a whistle and whip? Was it even possible to do, given the time and travel restrictions and visas and so on?

Yes.

It took all of a couple of hours, thanks to Ronald, the Corinthian leather voice on the other end of my phone call to JetBlue. Don’t bother trying to get information online about traveling solo to Cuba, you’ll give yourself scurvy. Travel agents, by the way, are as yet barred from making your arrangements. Just phone JetBlue, as I found out through a happy accident that’s too convoluted to bother explaining.

Here’s the drill: You give Ronald your passport information, and fill out an online form swearing under penalty of I-know-not-what to your absolutely legitimate reasons for visiting Cuba. The categories are loose: religious activities (so tempting to proselytize about something), humanitarian project, support for the Cuban people. About the only thing it seems you can’t do, so far as the US Government is concerned, is just go bake on the beach. I checked “journalist,” which is true, and he a restoration carpenter wanting a firsthand view of the architecture, which is also true. No one ever asked us for proof, before, during or after. Then we flew to Fort Lauderdale, the launching point for all JetBlue flights Cuba bound. We picked up a visa at the airport (there’s a guy selling them for $50 approximately four inches from our departure gate) and we flew to Havana. (American Airlines has Havana flights out of Newark and Miami International. Same deal with the close-at-hand visas.)

If it was this easy, I tell myself now, I would have booked fewer than nine days in the city and come up with some excuse for lying on a beach; surely there’s architecture to be seen, a story to tell, but it seemed so intimidating, groping along in the dark, fiddling with pages of web warnings and government-speak. If we were caught out in mild fudging would we face a firing squad? Guantanamo and waterboarding?

Having had a fantastic time with Air B&B in Rome last year, I gave it a try here. If you haven’t booked an Air B&B stay, it can be a great alternative to a hotel. In Italy we had a completely modern, wonderfully private one-bedroom apartment in a 2,000-year-old building in Trastevere, with a delightful terrace with orange trees scenting the air.

There are some charming apartments and rooms and homes to be had in Havana—one in particular whispered to me, white curtains billowing in a breeze from the sea. All of them were booked. We ended up with a room in Sol’s flat. He’s short and plump at the center, with stick legs and arms, like a child’s drawing of a man. Since he wears one each day, he apparently has a wardrobe of oversize sleeveless T-shirts, huge in the arm holes, to wear with a pair of khaki Banana Republic Bermuda shorts with a rip in the seat.

Sol speaks little English despite 12 years in the US, where he may or may not be a citizen, since we communicated mainly via charades. A chef in Miami, he moved back home to Havana about a year ago, bringing his sleek leather Roche Bobois sofa. The rest of his apartment was furnished with a mix of grandma’s castoffs, plastic flowers and Marilyn Monroe posters. Adding a frisson of danger were electrical wires hung over the bathtub that had something to do with hot water. There was not a hanger or a peg for our clothes, and the air that floated down a shaft into our room held both mold spores and bird effluvia.

However, Sol made me chicken soup when I had Fidel’s revenge one day, and bought The Prince a birthday cake, which was delicious, and sang Happy Birthday in a Broadway-quality voice. And it was cheap, about $75 a night including a lethal afternoon cocktail Sol invented called the Osvaldo, after the upstairs neighbor who once had a very, very bad day. There was also the occasional breakfast or snack, and it was centrally located, just a block and a half from the Malecon, Havana’s famed oceanfront promenade. (The ocean, by the way, is not swimmable in Havana, just dramatic. Sometimes it leaps the wall and floods the streets).

There are three main parts to the city.  The center, where we were staying, is third-world residential but with magnificent, jaw-dropping architecture. It looks as if bombs have gone off. Palm trees grow out of missing roofs, walls are falling down.  People live here, restoring portions of buildings, carving out a habitable niche. There are little home-based businesses everywhere: nail salons, barbers, food vendors, operating out of doorways. The bakery across the street,  which made that birthday cake, operates on the second floor of a row house, which has French doors to a catwalk balcony that remain open all day. The cakes and rolls are sold from a tiny stall in the ground-floor entry.

There are carts loaded with fruits, people riding bikes and holding poles dangling with loaves of bread for sale, and stores selling strange assortments of not much: a vacuum cleaner sharing a store window with a black-haired doll in a ruffled dress and a wrench. Spices are considered a fine house gift, though why there’s a cumin shortage is anyone’s guess. But the food everywhere was strikingly mediocre and every meal took forever to get through—three-hour lunches were  normal, most of that waiting to order and then waiting to pay the bill, severely limiting the time you have to do anything else.

Along the Malecon, a young woman, standing in the window of her house, watches her mother (presumably) as she jounces a well-wrapped infant. My Prince wanders near, gurgling as he does whenever he sees a baby, and the older woman smilingly hands him the baby. They coo at each other. We have a photo. Imagine that in Washington.

The cars were everything you imagined. Most were from the 1950s, bulbous of fender and huge. Some remodeled, most carefully, others inventively—Cadillac limos with the tops chopped off, painted flamingo pink. You can hail them like taxis, though they tend to be pricy. Far cheaper, and in their way more fun, are the pedicabs. Everyone expects you to bargain a bit.

Dogs scurry about self-importantly. They’re amusing to watch, but don’t touch them. They are not friendly and are inbred to the point where most seem to be the same medium-size brown dog.

Besides the dog(s), there is no sense of danger here. This is particularly shocking because almost everyone is wandering around with wads of cash, credit cards being worse than iffy. Even when a shop or restaurant says it takes them, an American card might not go through. A friend suggested we carry $1,500 in cash, which turned out to be far more than sufficient for a nine-day stay for the two of us, including all meals, the purchase of a Che Guevara T-shirt, $100 worth of cigars and a couple of bottles of Cuban rum.  In fact, the entire trip, with lodging and airfare, scarcely topped $2,000.

At the eastern end is the old part of the city, which for some reason is called Habana, with a “b,” a distinction I still don’t understand. As you’ll endlessly hear, Hemingway haunted the cafés in this part of town. El Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio are now haunted by tourists. The Capitol building is here, a ringer for ours, and fortresses with moats, charming squares and cafés, a smattering of interesting shops and galleries, fortune tellers, and stilt walkers in ruffled sleeves. This area is slowly undergoing a terrific revitalization—they’re determined not to turn the city into a theme park. While still largely a shambles, buildings are being restored, restaurants and cafés are lively, and some gorgeous old hotels are being rejuvenated, the sort with central courtyards, dripping with greenery and open to the sky. The Hotel Florida was particular eye candy. There were spanking new ones too, very modern and Euro-cool, though rather expensive. Craving a non-threatening shower, we tried to skip out on old Sol midway through our stay. One desk clerk quoted $400 per night, adding mournfully, “It’s much cheaper booked on line.”

Good luck with that. Internet and phone service are spotty. It was refreshing to do entirely without.

The newer part of the city, the main business and financial district, is in the west. This is where Sinatra, Bogart and Ava Gardner used to hang, hopping over by boat or plane from Key West, just 100 miles away. The Hotel Nacional, a replica of The Breakers in Palm Beach, built in 1930, sits on a point with a fabulous view. It’s a national monument, and considered (by Cubans) a five-star hotel, but it’s government-operated and a little dingy and sad, resembling the movie-set lobby of the Grand Budapest Hotel, when it was in decline. There are a number of museums worth seeing; the magnificent Napoleon Museum, for one, features splendid artwork, weapons—and the emperor’s unimaginably tiny armor. But the 125-acre Colón Cemetery, where Christopher Columbus was once interred, is sadly neglected, with tombs caved in and vaults ravaged, and the Quinta de Molina, a small botanic garden, has seen better days—though it has some engaging caged birds.

I’m tempted to say if we did this again I’d go for one of the grand hotels in the old city. However, Sol’s place and those of his neighbors were amazing experiences, if only in retrospect. We felt, for those days and nights, like residents of Havana, a feeling that could not be replicated by a stay in more traditional confines.

But, no matter where you stay or dine or what you do, keep in mind that this is not a luxury destination. Don’t bother complaining about hot water, lumpy beds and slow service. Don’t drink the water either. As a reviewer on Trip Advisor perfectly summed up a review of one fine old hotel, giving it four stars:  “Before I start, remember this hotel is in Havana. There are bits falling off the wall in the bedroom and the breakfast is different, to say the least.”

Four-stars in Havana might not be what you’re expecting. Roll with it, but do it soon: The mega-cruise ships are arriving shortly; can a Day’s Inn be far behind?

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

When she’s not gardening, LittleBird Stephanie wanders farther afield. You can find other travel pieces by her by searching her name in the Search box at the top of the page.

LittleBird Nancy also did the Cuban thing this year. A report of her culinary tour will appear next week.

This car’s owner must REALLY want a garden! / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

WHEN I WRITE my book about ugly gardens, which I shall do as soon as I’ve finished the other books I’m planning to write, this garden, photographed, will be the first one I’ll feature.

And why, you might ask.

I pass it near daily on my schlep to Capitol Hill’s Eastern Market to get coffee and whatnot. It is too irritating to ignore.

However, each time I whip out my camera, one of the denizens pops out and gives me the evil eye, like they’re lurking behind the door waiting for me to appear. And there I am.

So I pretend to be otherwise engaged, fiddling with my lens, casually humming to myself while shooting pictures of tree branches or the sidewalk, or examining the sole of my flip-flop for dog droppings and then sidling on by.

Designed to be ugly? / Photo here and on the front by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Today I won! I tiptoed forth, whipped the camera up, and snap snap. Triumph!

The thought behind an ugly garden is always most interesting. This patch was clearly designed to look this way. A severely listing rusted mailbox announces the garden’s entry. A line of rocks edges the brick path running from the gate to the front door and trims the base of the chain-link fence that surrounds the yard. A fence painted an effortful white, by the way.

Bricks also surround brick-colored patches of mulch and form a platform for a child’s turtle-shape sandbox that stares balefully through the links. Poor kid.

Appropriately, a pair of hazard cones stand like giant petrified candy canes along the alley fence.

I believe this would be known as the hardscaping.

As for greenery, there’s an impish fringe of weed along the path and fence line and a pot of dusty-looking zinnias (I think) beside the front door. Dirty white plastic window boxes sit empty on the windowsills.

On a somewhat more colorful note, there are rose-color plastic chairs planted next to the house.

As I may or may not have previously pointed out, a vividly colored chair or pot or umbrella can brilliantly stand in for flowers when the flowers are, for whatever reason, not.  Generally, however, this trick works best when there’s a spot of green around.

Curiously, there’s a rather handsome-looking Chinese screen filling the home’s bay window,  completely obliterating the garden view, as if even the perpetrators of this dismal plot can’t stand more than a wincing glance at their creation.

Or . . . maybe it was deliberately designed for tax evasion purposes—a sleight-of-sight obscuring the miniature Versailles within?

I could discuss my old neighbor Dr. Bruce and the dump he perpetrated on his neighbors, but I won’t.

Meanwhile, across the street from this delightful vision is a vehicle belonging to someone who clearly wants a garden so badly he or she or s/he or, to be perfectly gender neutral, ze, has AstroTurfed the car—and apparently drove it here from California. Appropriately decorated for both St. Patrick’s Day and Easter, there’s a bunny yoked to the front grill, and a leprechaun hat on the back platform. The aerial is covered with a strange yellow furz, as though the car hit a duck and the bird feathers fwapped around the metal pole. I don’t know what kind of car this is . . .

Oh, wait. Is it similar to mine? Does it resemble the banged-up yellow Mustang peeking from behind, the one with the door swung open (because it doesn’t close without some effort)? It’s not a convertible, sniff. But the body is certainly similar. People often gaze at my car with interest; in fact, I stopped at Safeway on my way home today and when I came out with my bananas and pierogi I found two gentlemen discussing its . . . attributes, I suppose. The twin curves of broken windshield, the patches of red paint peeping through the yellow, the artfully applied duct tape.

I offered to sell it. They laughed. “How old is it?” asked one.  “It’s an ’87,” I said. “Same age as my first car,” he laughed, patting his shiny black Lexus parked in the next slot over. “It runs,” I muttered.

AstroTurf. I hadn’t thought of alternative coverings.  Maybe a nice indoor-outdoor floral?

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie obviously appreciates all aspects of the urban landscape. You can read earlier columns by searching for Green Acre in the Search box at the top of the page.

The Prince, taking the found-treasure thing very seriously. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I’D MUCH RATHER find things than buy them. If I wait long enough, what I want usually appears, though I might not know I want it until it does.

Whatever it is will be lying about in discarded splendor, or given to me (since people know I have a magpie’s delight in cast-offs, the shinier the better,) and would be quite satisfactory or even better than what I might have bought. This is why I rarely buy anything (besides food—I have yet to dumpster-dive for celery and steak).

There are wonderful wrought-iron Alice in Wonderland chairs in the dining room that once belonged to actor John Heard’s mother, Helen, a long-ago friend who gave them to us (please don’t tell her son, he might want to snatch them back).  She also gave us a pen-and-ink drawing of a race horse that may or may not be Important, but that I happen to like.

The chair backs are high ovals with the metalwork knitted into a loose basket weave. They were a tad rusty, which is both good and bad. If your back itches you can rub up against them, which feels good. Doing so in your best cashmere sweater is bad.

Despite Princely huffing and puffing, I didn’t bother buffing out the rust. I sprayed them with red primer—as I’d read somewhere that red is the undercoat for gold leafing, which you can see for yourself if you have a gold-leafed object that’s sufficiently worn, or maybe has a nick or dent that exposes the layers.

Over the red I sprayed antique gold, thereby creating a gilded effect. There were no seats, so you could conceivably insert a chamber pot and turn one into a powder room, if you were so moved.  Instead, we (and I say this loosely) inserted rounds of plywood topped with foam and leopard-printed velvet. I should like to describe this in French while waving a jeweled cigarette holder, which would sound most exotic.

This is in line with the way we’ve acquired most of our chairs. Among them are two made of teak—wide of seat and needing just a bit of glue in the leg joints and a coat of taupish stain—that we picked up on the sidewalk walking home from dinner one night and that now occupy the front porch most handsomely.

A wing chair, covered in black linen with a muted floral pattern, a hint of red, a little gold, showed up among the Sunday-night garbage cans in Rehoboth Beach. It’s in the living room beside the fireplace. Happy as a cat.

Look at the wonderful busyness of the iron on this chair, one of a pair found in a Washington alley. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

The brown leather club chair that sits for no particular reason (no one ever sits in it) in front of a Chinese screen in a corner of the dining room was found waving at us from a pile at the Washington dump, on a trip to get rid of some detritus or other. At least we were tossing something as we were acquiring.

Most recently appeared a pair of iron outdoor chairs, photographed here and on the front, and found deposited in a nearby alley. For the trash.

Can you imagine tossing such treasure?

The wonderful busyness of the iron, the mesh of patterns, so pleasing. Particularly delightful in the gloom of a foggy morning a few minutes into spring. And the color! How perfectly coordinated is verdigris to the hint of rust where the hand rubs the arms, and along the edges of the seat. Not the color so much as their wabi-sabi* mood.

These chairs had been in storage, who knows where. They are intended to fold, but are rusted open. I’d like to see them hanging on hooks on some wall, maybe in our basement guest room that is insisting on developing a Mediterranean style: beamed ceiling, whitewashed brick walls, concrete floor stained to an agreeably mottled burnt sienna hue.

It would be nice if the French doors could be flung open to a patio and not the underside of the back porch where ages of bikes are heaped, waiting for someone here to be inspired to oil one, inflate the tires, climb on and ride, which is neither here nor there but unlikely to happen.

My Prince, pinching his nose and going all authoritative, says these chairs must be sanded and the rust spots primed and he will get to them soon, or shortly after he gets to everything else that needs fixing. Perhaps he can even make them open and shut. And no, I can’t do it because I’ll just make my usual mess.

Which is so.

On the other hand, it’s amazing what a can of spray paint can do. It’s been 20 years since Helen gave us the dining-room chairs and that they’re nothing more than gilded rust the Prince has conveniently forgotten.

Anyway, the end of a perfect afternoon: At lunch yesterday at LittleBird Nancy’s house, I happened to complain about my hip pain, which could of course simply be misplaced back pain. Which is neither here nor there. Anyway, I was whining, and Nancy started talking about an episode in France last fall when friends she was traveling with got tired of her limping and wheezing and ran out and bought her a cane (two canes, actually, but that’s a whole other story). Nancy popped up from the sofa, looked around her cluttered living room and spotted one of the canes sticking out from behind . . . something. What a difference a cane makes when you’re limping around in pain!

I happily gimped down the street to my car and back to Capitol Hill, with another successful found object in my possession, received rather than purchased. No spray paint required.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

*Wabi-sabi is an actual term, neither made-up nor Yiddish. It’s a Japanese concept, an acceptance of transience and imperfection. This excellent thought lets you affect an artsy posture when you just don’t feel like fixing something.

LittleBird Stephanie writes about gardening when she feels like it. You can read earlier columns by typing Green Acre in the Search box at the top of the page.

The green poufs in question. They did look terrific . . . for a while. / Photo above and on front by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I AM ABOUT to provide you with some foresight. Or is it hindsight. Well, my hindsight, your foresight. You can thank me later.

Remember last week when I gushed on about the wonderful green balls and bitty flowers on wonderful display behind my sofa?

The garden witch at Eastern Market swore that this $20 bunch of jolly green poufs would last me three weeks. It did not. We just passed two weeks and I have discarded all but one branch and that one branch has a few sad pendules suspenduled,* and these are beginning to seep a silky fuzz from barely visible cracks.

The worst of it happened late last week, when the branches began exploding all over the cushions. I carefully lifted them from the vase and tiptoed to the kitchen sink as fairy fluffs flew off, floating in the shimmering dust that is the air in my living room.

And then they went insane, sticking to the damp of the kitchen sink and the towels I attempted to use to mop them up and spraying the counter along with the this-and-that I keep about and catching in my hair and my clothes and my frigging contact lenses, you should pardon my French. We will be eating this stuff for days. I now stick to serving white foods.

I thought, as I cursed and dusted and mopped, that I should really take a photo of this because it is ridiculous and a perfect example of how just when I think my life is tidy, maybe even a little cool, that same life laughs hysterically as I flail about.

Living is a treacherous thing to do. You never know. You just never, never know.

Anyway, to resume, we are down to a few of these pouf balls, a sorry display that continues to seep and is about to explode one final time and I hope I remember not to buy these things (which I still don’t know the name of) ever again.

They did look pretty though, didn’t they?

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

*These are not actual words, not even in Yiddish.

OH, LOOK WHAT I just bought!  Well, I bought most of it.

The urban gardener’s intended effect, had she had her plastic bottle.

These jolly green lanterns sparked with insignificant yet sprightly white flowers dingle-dangle from what look like stems of bamboo. There was a mountainous display of them at Washington DC’s Eastern Market, and, as the flower witch who tends the stall assured me, they will last for three weeks. $20. Three weeks. That’s, uh . . . $6 and change per week. A great deal more than the nothing I usually spend but really—is this not a fantastic sight?

The bunch, which was sizable to begin with, is nestled in some leafy branches that were downed in a big wind (with maybe a little twist of the wrist to aid and abet), a handy idea when you have only a little this and that and want to DO SOMETHING with it. In this case, the branches provide support for the slender stems and also amplify their fabulousness, which I’ve then doubled by standing the display in front of a mirror.

It’s all stuffed into a broken pedestal that I’ve blathered on about at least once before. Since it’s plaster, and porous, it won’t hold water.  A plastic water bottle with the top sawed off is stuck in the opening. This is a very handy idea for rescuing leaky vases, and items that were never meant to be vases but would look good with a little floral action. Like maybe a boot.

That is, when one’s Prince has not discarded one’s bottle, which is what happened on this particular occasion.

Before we flew off to Havana several weeks ago, I did a cleaning. Along with making sure one has on reasonable underwear in case one gets hit by a truck on the way to wherever, I make sure my house is reasonably tidy in case the plane goes down and the house is crawled over by weeping survivors who will no doubt comment on my housekeeping skills, ignoring the fact that a little mess is the mark of an interesting woman, or so an old friend once insisted and I took to heart.

The discarded detritus included ancient headphones that had lost the spongy pads, a shot pair of sandals and a broken pair of sunglasses. Of course these were retrieved from the trash bin and put on the kitchen counter with a note from himself: “Did you mean to throw these away?”

Meanwhile, he had taken it upon himself to throw out my plastic water bottle.

I ask you. Does he ever throw out anything of his own? How is it that he so cavalierly feels he can decide what of mine is trash?

One (meaning him) would think this is not a big deal; in fact he offered words to that effect—something about the multitude of plastic water bottles in the fridge. But! That was a special bottle. First I had to locate a tape measure and then I had to measure and then I had to write the measurement on a piece of paper and then I had to go to the market with the paper and the tape measure and measure water bottles to find the perfect fit.  And, as this all took place more than a few minutes ago, I forgot which brand and size I had settled on.

So I’m standing there, distraught, envisioning this fabulous bunch of stuff exploding behind the living room sofa. I stuck the bunch in another vase and proceeded to sulk.

Thankfully, as it turned out, the water bottle had dropped and rolled under the radiator as The Prince was taking out the trash, so this crisis was averted.*  What you see here in my picture was the effect I intended.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie writes about flowers and city gardening and The Prince, her husband of many years, whose name we may someday learn. Or not.

*Dammit. The mourners would have found that bottle under the radiator, and Who would be blamed, I ask you?

The mosaic by Marc Chagall that spent decades in the Georgetown garden of John and Evelyn Nef. It’s now in the National Gallery of Art’s Sculpture Garden. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

SOME YEARS AGO, as part of a particularly happy assignment for the Washington Post, I interviewed Evelyn Nef  about the Chagall in her Washington DC garden, the only Marc Chagall mosaic in a private home in the world.

She was 95 years old that summer and when I called for an appointment her secretary told me I could come only in the afternoon as “Mrs. Nef exercises in the mornings.”

Her workouts paid off, since after greeting me at the front door she did a little soft-shoe down the hallway saying, “Come into my back yard and see a marvel!”

We went out and plopped ourselves down on a bench in the shade and I listened to her tell the story of how this mosaic arrived from France by ship in 10 panels.

It was, she told me, a hostess gift.

Chagall was a good friend of her third husband, historian John Ulrich Nef, whom she married in 1964.

“Every summer, we went to France and saw the Chagalls,” she recalled. The people, not the paintings.

“We always went to the Hotel du Cap—they’d come to get away from the tourists in summer. In the morning, Marc would paint and my husband would write and Valentina and I would gossip. We became like a family.

“When he’d come to New York, where Matisse [son of painter Henri Matisse] was his dealer, he’d visit us in Washington. He loved the village of Georgetown and shopping at Woolworth for new pencils and colored crayons.”

When the artist proposed the mosaic for the garden, she was imagining a plaque of some sort, “a little 8-by-10-inch thing to hang,” she described with her hands. “I did not know I’d have to build a wall.”

Hereabouts is where the story for the Post ended, but my meeting with Mrs. Nef continued. There was a bit more to this story.

We talked, or she talked, for an hour and a half noting that John Nef began collecting Chagalls and Picassos and works by their contemporaries before they were famous.

“My husband bought 13 of Picasso’s circus etchings for $100,” she told me. $100.

“Are they at the National Gallery?” I asked, since she’d already mentioned that the mosaic would go to the gallery on her death.

“No dear,” she said. “They’re in the house.”

And up the sweet little old lady with the twinkly eyes and coral lipstick got up and led me back into the house and we stood at the base of the staircase where the Picassos were hopping up the wall and my head spun a cotton-candy mass that threatened to stop me breathing.

She pointed out another Picasso hanging on a wall next to the front door, actually hidden behind it when the door was opened. Following down the hallway and into the living room and dining room she pointed out more Chagalls—including seven lithographs he did for her over the years as birthday gifts—and more Picassos, all mingled with works by Whistler,  Dufy,  Matisse, Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister), a sketch by Le Corbusier (another house gift!), a Maillol sculpture on a pedestal in the living room beside the piano, and on and on and all hung as casually as the way you’d hang posters from MOMA on the walls of your first apartment, perhaps even more casually.

And you could stand so close, nose to nose. Close enough to blow the dust off a gilded frame. Close enough to trace a jut of Picassan nose with a fingertip . . .

Did I mention that Evelyn Nef’s name and address were in the phone book? That she never asked for identification, never double-checked my credentials?

Oh, the opportunities for perfect crimes I have passed up!

Nef’s treasures are now in the safe keeping of the National Gallery of Art, and that amazing Chagall mosaic was reassembled in the Sculpture Garden, just beyond the pavilion in a woody grove. A wonder for all to see.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie writes about gardens, although they don’t usually contain Chagall mosaics. To read earlier columns, just search for Green Acre in the Search box up top.

Flower power in the flesh. / Photo courtesy the Philadelphia Flower Show.

WASHINGTON CONTINUES its march toward the most floriferous spring in memory, with cherry trees, daffodils and tulips beginning to bloom, and mock orange, hydrangeas and roses leafing out months ahead of schedule.

Usually this unnatural combination of flowers is visible only at the Philadelphia Flower Show, where city-size plots manicured by top designers brim with fantasy: Full-grown trees, waterfalls and ponds, and plants that never bloom together are nurtured to peak in time for a floral extravaganza.

Each year has a theme. This time it’s Holland: Flowering the World, and a “controlled chaos” of flowers, according to the press release. Wander under a bridge inspired by the Dutch canals and decorated with Delft tile, brim-full flower boxes and hanging baskets, and enter the centerpiece of the show, a floral canopy of more than 6,000 cut and dried flowers hovering above thousands of tulips, fritillaria, narcissus and anemones.

As always, there will be many demonstrations and lectures and special events, including competitions, wherein the truly anal demonstrate their ability to spend the winter bringing their azaleas and whatnots into premature flowering perfection; and displays of miniature gardens with gnomes and itty-bitty twig cottages that make my skin crawl, but that is neither here nor there; new this year is a “spa experience,” for some reason.

A blooming window box from a past Philadelphia Flower Show. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

There are always flower boxes dazzling in their inventiveness, marvelously inspirational, with so many tricks to try that sadly, more often than not, don’t pan out. Like inserting vases and margarita glasses to loft your display and add color and whimsy. The less said about my experiment with that, the better. Suffice it to say you have to be willing to stand in front of your personal display and keep adjusting and watering for four or five months.

In normal years, you leave the show panting for spring, knowing it’s weeks away and there’s nothing to look forward to but pale sun and chilly drizzle. So you stick your nose in a gardening book or two and daydream this year’s impossibilities; oh my goodness, how this and that will look—dreams that ultimately lead to what do I do about the damn black spot. Again.

Ah, but this year, this year . . . there’s already a flower show happening outside your door—a chaos that just needs to be controlled—and the Philadelphia Flower Show, run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, is just the place to go for the brightest ideas on how to do that.

If you haven’t been before, play hooky from work and visit on a weekday; it’s marginally less crowded, though there are more strollers to trip over. In 2017, the show will run from March 11 through 19, with adult tickets priced at $28 if purchased online, $35 at the box office, and additional discounts for children and students.

Philadelphia has this event down to a science. There are plenty of lots for parking—or take the train, which I did one year. You get off and clear signs (!) lead you to the subway, which scoots you directly to the Convention Center.

Take a break for a cheese steak at the classic food market next door and return to the shopping area for garden ornaments and tools, books, bulbs, plants and cut stems.

Curly willow is a particular favorite of mine, with twisted stems four feet tall in red or green. The branches are occasionally available locally, for about twice the price, so they’re worth schlepping.

Stick them dry in a vase and they’ll stay until you start sneezing from the dust, which could take years depending on your housekeeping. Better still, trim a bit off the stem ends and stick them in water and within a couple of weeks they’ll leaf out most beautifully, a stunning tabletop display.

They let down a mass of roots and theoretically you can plant them. I have had absolutely no success with this, though I’ve seen them growing outside a florist in Old Town so I know it can be done. I suspect it may be a Gay Thing, as some things just are. You know?

There is a also variety of philodendron that I’ve seen only at the show that is sold in a bunch of foot-long branches or stems. If you can snag a few of these, stick them in water and they’ll grow for years, eventually poking at the ceiling, with absolutely no care whatsoever. They make an outstanding display in spots where you want a fuss-free and really dramatic accent.

One thing to avoid is the plumeria, and it will be tough to do. The flowers are like small orchids and the smell is so heady and tropical that you can pass out at a whiff. There are always sweet little Hawaiian women, so trustworthy, grandmotherly-looking, peddling these sticks, shyly smiling and swearing that there’s nothing to growing them. Just stick it in soil and you’ll be rewarded with a paradise of sight and scent. They lie.

While you will faithfully water and croon over that stick, months will pass before it sends forth a single green leaf, which will slowly blacken and the whole thing will rot and be tossed in the trash.

Consider yourself warned. Now go!

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie writes about city gardening. We agree with her that the Philadelphia Flower Show is a wonder of the New World.

A neighbor’s early-blooming camellias. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THE PRINCE thinks it’s spring. I have to stay on his tail (to put it politely) to prevent him from messing with the garden. Though I do understand the urge. It’s February, the top is down on our rattletrap Mustang, and I’m wearing a T-shirt and sandals to Harris Teeter.

Baby has spring fever too. She called, wanting to know if she could plant some seeds, ignoring the last frost date, which is mid-April in Raleigh, North Carolina, land of the fried Ho Ho, where she’s living with her Personal Prince Pete. Seeds are cheap, I said, find a sunny spot near the warmth of a wall and it’s worth a shot, though if we have a cold snap they will likely fail.

Then I saw Jackie, a real estate agent far too young for her billowing mane of iron-gray hair, a cameo face surrounded by

Daffs are joining the crocuses this year. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

storm clouds, which makes it stunning. She was showing a house on Capitol Hill and I was amusing myself by pondering what $1.5 million now looks like. Rather like my house, if you piped in some Piaf, added a fancy shower, bumped out this, fixed that. One small leap, I’m thinking. We bought it for $102,000 (that $2,000 being a make or break number as I recall). Shocking.

She says, to get back to the point, which as usual escaped me, that the weather makes her want to dig in the garden. Plant seeds, maybe heirloom tomatoes, zinnias.

Yes, I agree. It’s bloody tempting. Whereforth the arctic shroud of Februarys past, or words to that effect.

After all, the first of the daffodils are already blooming in the sunniest spots. One expects crocus in February, and snowdrops, and early-blooming camellias (why did I plant one that blooms in the fall?). But the appearance of hellebores in full flower, and the pokings-up of the tulips? Look closely and the roses and mock orange, even the hydrangeas, are beginning to pop with tiny leaves.

The early-blooming cherries are out particularly early too—these are not The Cherries, they’re another variety, so worry not.

Every five years or so we have one of those springs where everything comes blasting up simultaneously and stays—as long as the temperature remains somewhat cool, neither freezing nor baking. The daffs last for weeks, joined by the tulips, the roses, the lilacs, all manner of flowers that are supposed to appear in stages. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Those rare years the city looks like a florist’s fridge, with gardens bringing forth weeks of impossible combinations – along with the constant fear that The Cherry blossoms, the ones that rightly bloom around April Fool’s Day, will freeze before they flower.

Given what the forecasters are saying, this looks to be one of those years. There’s no frost predicted in the near future, and the near future takes us nearly to spring itself—when we might get a blast of icy air for a minute or two but nothing catastrophic to fragile blossoms.

Enjoy!

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie writes about flowers and gardens and her tiny urban plot. For previous columns, type Green Acre into the Search box at the top of the page.

A rosy pre-Valentine’s street scene. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THE ROSES were marching through Metro. Guys abashed, aglow, red stems wrapped in crinkled paper. One dapper gent, an extreme outlier in a fine camel-hair coat, hoisted what appeared to be a fine marijuana plant.

Tall, dark, handsome, squat, old, young—all men on a mission.

There was the occasional woman. One sat across from me, in tight black jeans and painfully tall stilettos cuddling two bunches of carmine tulips.

At Foggy Bottom, competing stands boasted $10 bunches of roses, all of them red. At Whole Foods they filled the sidewalks.

Valentine’s Day.

I ordered a mop for The Prince. It’s a Libman Wonder Mop, which he experienced at my sister’s place in Florida. He scrubbed her terraces after washing the windows. I have a photo. The mop has fabric tassels and a self-wringer. The mop head is decorated with red polka dots, the handle is white; the colors of the Bulgarian flag. “I could use this on the

Genuine photo of The Prince ensuring the best view from the balcony of LittleBird Stephanie’s sister’s place in Florida. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

basement floor,” he murmured to himself. “But not on the wood floors, it might snag.” I knew then that nothing would thrill him more.

He’s big on mopping, and sweeping. It’s his form of meditation. Within five minutes of return from a two-week vacation he will sweep the street. “They’ll know I’m back,” he says, meaning the neighbors. On one trip, to the Dominican Republic I think it may have been, he took out a kayak. Baby (who was still traveling with us back then) and I observed from our lounges that he was sweeping the ocean.

I’ve tried buying him flowers in the past, but he accuses me of buying them for myself, which could be true. Now I make him a special dinner, mussels or salmon—favorite foods that are not mine so it’s clear that it’s his treat.

He usually buys me a plant, something flowering and heavily scented, and sometimes he repeats himself. For the last two years it’s been Stephanotis, a supercharged jasmine-like plant, though it’s not a jasmine. That’s fine, it does well winding around the back-porch railings in the summer, fat white blossoms slowly opening and perfuming the air.

What I’d really like is a roast beef . . . sigh. A two-rib (three? Be still my heart) roast, crusty on the outside, medium rare within. Yorkshire pudding. Creamed spinach. I don’t mind cooking a feast for myself, just hand me that slab of beef. No bow necessary.

Once you’ve been married 33 years, or maybe it’s 34, romance changes.

As it turned out, this Valentine’s Day was all about him. A floater in his eye mimicking a spiderweb across his vision sent him terrified to the eye doctor. We held hands in the waiting room, and watched Sell It or Fix It or somesuch on HGTV. I hate ornamental shutters, particularly those that don’t even bother to abut the windows.

But that is neither here nor there.

Nearby, a mocha-colored man in a beige leisure suit with what looked like a spot of egg on the lapel robo-called women, leaving messages one after the other in his best Al Green purr. “Hello, honey, happy Valentine’s Day, maybe we can get together later.” I suspected the women had caller ID.

Then the doc called The Prince in, did something magic with a laser, and we went home and watched Meryl Streep in Florence Foster Jenkins and I made crab cakes and biscuits.

He says maybe he’ll do Valentine’s Day on Saturday. That’s fine, as long as he’s there.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie writes about city gardening (and many other things). You can read her previous dispatches by searching for Green Acre.

The Meyer lemon chez Cavanaugh. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THERE ARE CERTAIN plants in my little solarium that are passing the winter in a sorry state, spindly and barely clinging to life. So sad do they look that I kept them nestled against healthier specimens, like one set of sticks that’s been sitting for months scarcely pimpled with bitty leaves.

Friend Maggie gave me that plant last spring, when she came to dinner. A lovely little bushy thing it was, and I did have its name tag handy for months and months and then lost it . . . so I have no recollection of what it’s called but I do remember

iStock photo.

reading that it was a favorite in Victorian conservatories. I also recall that the plant had small but sprightly orange flowers—or it did when I received it.

As it so often happens, heavy sigh, when the plant was moved to what I considered to be a reasonable spot in the actual outdoor garden (in this garden there are no such things as ideal spots), the flowers faded and dropped off while the branches grew increasingly piddly and scrawny.

And when it moved inside for the winter it just sat there being sulky; why I bothered even watering I just don’t know. But then, about 10 days ago there were suddenly little swellings along those skinny stalks. And I said to myself, better prune this sucker, elsewise you’re going to be sorry.

But I was so happy to see something happening that I couldn’t bring myself to clip . . . and each day I watched as the swellings became ragged little green leaves with tiny splotches of yellow and I cooed and couldn’t cut.

And then, last night (or so it seems), clusters of buds appeared on top of the sticks.

So what do I do now? If I prune it down perhaps the plant will branch and get bushy and more flowers will emerge and wouldn’t that be nice I say to myself, rather gently, because I can become truculent if I’m ordered about.

And myself replies: But maybe not! Maybe these are the only buds we’ll see. Can’t we leave it be?

The eye glances toward the Meyer lemon that sat for years with a broken branch wrapped with brown paper packing tape and supported with green wire, the only branch on the plant that ever bore fruit. A few weeks ago I finally bit the bullet with that one, and the whole bleeding thing is positively floriferous, dripping honey-scented buddlings.

Hand me those secateurs. It’s on.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie writes about city gardening. You can read previous columns by searching for Green Acre in the Search box, top right.

HOW GRAND the sago palm looks, perched on a pedestal on the mahogany chest in the front hall.

Just before Christmas, fearing a cold snap that had yet to materialize, My Prince hauled the weighty planter in from the front porch and patiently moved it here and there while I waved him to and fro until it came to rest, reflected in the mahogany-framed mirror that tops the chest.

Ice cubes can take a lot of the stress out of watering indoor plants–there’s no need to aim a stream of water . . . and miss! / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Taking pity—the pot plus the soil easily weighs 40 awkward pounds, and the fronds of the sago are as sharp as the teeth of vicious elves—I let him drop it on the dining room sideboard, moving a Grand Arrangement of things living and dead (in a pot of similar weight) to behind the living room sofa, where it replaced the dramatically broken pedestal planter that I use as a vase (thanks to the insertion of a plastic water bottle), which was then moved to the dining room table.

This did not work. While the broken pedestal was suitably dramatic on the table, with several enormous philodendron leaves tickling the air, and the sago palm looked good on the dining room’s sideboard, that Grand Arrangement previously on the sideboard looking sneeringly fussy in the living room—quite alarmingly so.

I looked at the Prince. The Prince looked at me. “I am a busy man and you are a pain in the ass,” he said, perhaps phrasing this less gently.

Thankfully, Muscular Mike, the Prince’s frequent assistant, was loitering about and was therefore hijacked into rearranging the various arrangements. Eventually, this brought the sago to the hallway, the Grand Arrangement back to the dining room sideboard, and returned the broken pedestal to the living room. I fluffed some flowers in a Chinese vase.

I’m scratching my head thinking of something I can add to that, but I can’t, so here’s a picture of mine.

Heloise’s helpful hint but my bulb baster, for plants only. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THE PRINCE AND I forgot our anniversary this year. Baby called to congratulate us the morning of and . . . well.

Following many seconds of research, I found that the site anniversariesbyyear.com had several gift suggestions for our 34th, which is what this was, including unisex Ray Ban sunglasses (a pair for each of us, I guess) and a “cork cage” shaped like the Eiffel Tower in which to store our discarded wine corks. Spending the week in Paris was not proposed, nor were any plants.

But a plant is what I got.  Specifically, a Calamondin, a plant I’d never heard of, which always delights me.

Meanwhile, I made dinner. Quite a lovely one it was, involving filet mignon, creamed spinach and parmesan polenta. We shared it with our 93-year-old German friend Margot, who’d been invited to join us before we remembered we had an Occasion To Celebrate. Candles were lit, Piaf sang. Très romantique.

The Calamondin bills itself as “the other lime,” though it smells like an orange, specifically the insanely sweet scent of the orange blossom perfume that my friend Kristen brought back for me from a trip to Cocoa Beach maybe 15 years ago. Pure 1950s Florida in a bottle.

I keep the perfume on my desk and sniff it in times of (generalized) panic, like tropical smelling salts, which is why the bottle is still full. This is not the sort of scent one, meaning me, wears in public.

Anyway, my new and deliciously scented plant joins the key lime, the Meyer lemon and the various jasmine, hibiscus, amaryllis and bromeliads that winter in my tiny solarium.

While Clamondins were introduced to Florida in 1899 (according to Purdue University’s horticultural site), I had never heard of them. These prolific fruiters are said to be juicy and sweet; the plants grow in anything from clay to sand, and are reasonably cold tolerant.

Plus! Duke reports the fruit can be used as a shampoo, a hair growth stimulant and a laxative. It’s also said to ease the itch of insect bites, bleaches freckles,  soothes coughs and “expels phlegm,” and the leaves can be brewed to create a “carminative”* more powerful than peppermint at relieving flatulence.

It’s also “a prime host of the Mediterranean and Caribbean fruit flies,” however these are not known plant threats in Washington, DC.

All in all a perfect plant, eh?

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie writes about city gardening. To see earlier columns, type her name or Green Acre in the Search box at the top of the page.

* Carminative. What a dainty term that I’d never heard of!

The butler arrives, crystal glass on silver salver: “Your carminative, madam.”

“Thank you, Reginald, please crack the window before you retire.”

The conservatory chez Cavanaugh. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I SUPPOSE it’s time to properly introduce my solarium, a place I touched upon some months ago. Most of what gardening I do in the winter takes place in the greenhouse that has replaced the little open porch off my second-floor office.

It was constructed five years ago by My Prince and his sorry assistant, Muscular Mike, whose major employ is hefting things and then leaving promptly at 5, no matter what is going on, to drink at the Tune Inn, Capitol Hill’s historic dive bar.

The impetus was getting the damn tropical plants off the damn kitchen counter where My Prince slices banana for his

The grand-dog Lula doesn’t look so murderous, lounging in the solarium, does she? / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

cereal among other culinary adventures; the very same counter where I was growing all manner of delightful things that don’t take well to frost: jasmine and orange and lime and gardenia etc.

While the kitchen is narrow, with all the appliances along one wall—an arrangement often referred to as a Pullman kitchen for its resemblance to a (toy) train car—I had no difficulty making dinner for 10 in the midst of my jungle, but he found it irritating.

In that case, I suggested, perhaps I might tack up plastic sheets around the porch for the winter. This is the kind of suggestion that fills him with fear, that I might risk death falling off the ladder—or worse, that I might fall into a vegetative state and he’d spend the rest of this mortal coil changing my diapers.

So off he trucked to his favorite haunt, Community Forklift in Hyattsville, Maryland, a place where someone of his disposition can lose himself for hours amid the rusted claw-foot bath tubs, 1950s kitchen cabinets, broken slabs of marble and other precious relics, and return with a load of . . . bits and building bobs, in this case enormous windows, French doors and narrow sidelights to fill in gaps.

In a stunning burst of industry and with astonishing speed, the porch rails came down and were replaced with a glassed-in sky box. I don’t think it took a week. This was remarkable because most tasks around here never get completed, or even partially completed, never mind started, with the speed of a wounded snail, as I may have mentioned more than once.

You would think I would be the beneficiary of all manner of magnificent home improvements—The Prince is, after all, a restoration carpenter. But no.

I close my eyes to his insistence that this is not actually a permanent greenhouse; that the patch of pink label up near the

sky light that reads “Owens Corning Extruded Polystyrene Insulating Foam,” is just temporary; and at some point (in the next 20 years, or just before we move to the end-stage senior community) it will be extended across the rear of the house, have multiple sets of French doors, and perhaps an extra bath. That’s what he says.

As I said, I close my eyes and give thanks for what I’ve got and year by year the solarium grows ever fuller with plants of extravagant foliage and scent awaiting the return of summer.

For a while there were birds, parakeets that flew about freely and had raucous conversations. I miss them, but they were extremely messy and they stank. We will not get into what happened to them, though my grand-dog Lula the Murderess was involved.

Now, along with the jasmine and lemon blossoms, there are several white wicker chairs and a small table. Sometimes on weekends we have breakfast there, toting platters of eggs and coffee and the newspapers upstairs and sit reading and eating in the tropical sun.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is hunkered down in her solarium these days, but her work on city gardening proceeds apace. For more of her Green Acre columns, search for Green Acre in the Search box at the top right of the page.

LittleBird Stephanie doesn’t necessarily like the color green, and yet her living room, above, and dining room are kinda mossy. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

EVER WONDER WHY you can buy a ball gown to match your bidet?

This is not serendipity. It is thanks to the sages at the Pantone Color Institute, whose denizens conjure the colors we’ll crave several years from now—which is the lead time necessary for fashion, appliance and furniture designers to develop coordinated products and move them into stores.

Pantone’s Greenery

The same people who brought you the 1970s pestilence called avocado now present the color of the year: Greenery.  The yellow-green color of emerging ferns, it’s “a refreshing and revitalizing shade,” they say. “Greenery is symbolic of new beginnings . . . the first days of spring when nature’s greens revive, restore and renew . . . the fortifying attributes of Greenery signal consumers to take a deep breath, oxygenate and reinvigorate.”

As opposed to hyperventilate.

They call it “nature’s neutral,” which you might have mistakenly assumed was some mild and fawny shade of gray, which has been the de facto color of every year for at least the last five; considered the perfect background for everything from your Picasso to your La Cornue range.

La Cornue, by the way, now offers its Chateau range, $53,600 plus freight and delivery (not available on Amazon), in five shades of light green (or a custom shade if none of those suit; there’s probably a modest up-charge involved).

The Washington Post recently offered up more than a dozen ways to use the shade at home, among them highball glasses, poufs, sheets and lamps.

Despite my delight in gardens (note I did not say gardening—I rather dislike all that sweaty schlepping and digging), I’ve never much cared for the color green. In fact, I was frightened by pea soup, promptly dropped out of the Girl Scouts after trying on the uniform and skunked out of a bridesmaid role that required a parade float of lettuce green chiffon that, 40 years later, I still recall with horror.

The green in the hallway of LittleBird Stephanie’s home is the hue familiar to diehard British mystery-at-the-manor fans. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Green has, however, crept up on the house over the years, nearly wrapping every room in some shade of the color. The living and dining rooms are mossy, the hallway is that murder-in-the-library hue familiar to hounds of British TV. The bathroom ceiling is as deep as late-summer leaves, and the front of the house is mostly a silvery green, except for a strange patch of gray beside the drainpipe. But don’t get me started on that.

So it seems, for once, we’re totally in step with what’s considered cool.

“Wrapping the room” is an actual decorating term, for when an entire space is a single color, or shades of a single color.

Our artist friend Jill has completely green-wrapped her rambling pre-war (do people still understand what this means? Which war?)  apartment on Connecticut Avenue. A fresh, sprightly green colors every wall, and the woodwork as well. Outside the window are great and ancient trees, and perched on a living room sofa one feels among them. There is a virtually seamless transition from the outdoors; in daylight the room is bathed in green-gold light. She doesn’t have or need a balcony or terrace.

One breathes in deeply, and exhales.

We shall never go so far. The century-old house My Prince and I occupy has chestnut woodwork that has never been painted; it still wears a somewhat crackled coat of original varnish. (One real estate agent, now deceased, though that is neither here nor there and not my fault, described the wood as suited to a funeral home.)

I prefer to think of the floors and staircase as an echo of the massive elms that line the street, the windows and glass doors their frames, and the green walls their leaves.

The house to us feels like a garden, a fine place to sit when there’s little to do outside besides curse what went wrong last season, enjoy thinking about what went well, and contemplate spring—and yet another chance to get it right.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is working on a book about city gardening. To read all of her columns, type Green Acre into the Search box at the top of the page.