THE HOLIDAYS are finally gone from the mantel. The peacock-feather boa and birds and baubles are stashed for next year. It does take me a while to put away that boa, sigh.
In their place are small vases and glasses stuffed with sprigs of rosemary,…

Green Acre #227: Post-Holiday Greens

INTERIOR DESIGNERS think about “layers” when creating a room. There’s the floor covering (or not), the walls papered or painted, the windows shaded or draped, then furniture cushy or sleek, and finally the tchotchkes that give the room texture,…

Green Acre #226: Layers of Color, Layers of Life

JASMINE IS not difficult to grow. While a tropical or semi-tropical plant, and given to abrupt and shocking death if exposed to extended freezing temperatures, if brought inside for the winter, given some sunlight and moist soil, it will do just…

Green Acre #225: All That Jasmine

TIME’S UP! It’s Christmas Eve and there are still a few gifts to be got. If you’ve a gardener on your list, you’ve got it easy: There are plenty of quick and dirty ways to say it with flowers—and you won’t have to go farther than the supermarket or…

Green Acre #224: Very-Last-Minute Gardener Gifts

I HAVE A Hanukkah bush. My husband, The Prince, has a Christmas tree. They sit in a corner of the dining room and you’re forgiven if you see only one. Or the other. It’s a single tree—we just see it differently.
A star as a tree-topper would be going…

Green Acre #223: Christmas? Hanukkah? As Long as It’s Glitzy

MY HOLIDAY window boxes are a repeat of last year and the year before and the year before that. . . . Big purple bows tie purloined branches of fir that drip over the front of each box and stand at attention in the rear. Glittery stems poke out here…

Green Acre #222: Deck the Halls . . . and Window Boxes

I’M GOING OUT to sweep leaves,” announced My Prince. “Alexa, play Bach, please.” He’s very polite to Alexa, though he insists he hates her. “It’s for the birds,” he told me, heading out the door.
We have parakeets again. What’s a jungle without them?…

Green Acre #221: Hello, Birdie!

I ALWAYS considered my dad to be the family artiste. The showman. The bon vivant. Mom? She was the handmaiden.
It’s my birthday and I’m thinking of her. She’s been gone 42 years, and I’m saddened that I scarcely realized how extraordinary she was…

Green Acre #220: Thanks, Mom

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

Green Acre #219: An Invader Worse Than Kudzu?

I’M SITTING at the dining table staring at a milk jug filled with peonies in full bloom. They are fake.
The jug appeared on the kitchen counter a few days ago, along with a clay pot with a live plant I suspect is Mexican heather; a little leggy but…

Green Acre #218: Real Thoughts About Fake Flowers

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

Green Acre #217: Ticking the (Window) Boxes

THERE ARE 50 houses lining Walter Street SE, a one-block stretch of 10-foot-wide porch-front homes on Washington DC’s Capitol Hill. Possibly the most close-knit block in this close-knit neighborhood, the street offers weekly porch-front happy hours,…

Green Acre #216: Boo! and a Book

MY PRINCE is getting ahead of himself again.
Comes the first mild day in March and he’s bounding downstairs to shut off the boile—the big old contraption in the basement that the home inspector told us was on its last legs, 38 years ago. “It’s…

Green Acre #215: Getting Ahead of Winter

WHILE I HAVE occasionally been accused of blathering on about nothing every week, sometimes I’m hard pressed to do so.
Usually, I have no trouble dredging up something to say, a knack developed when Baby was in fourth grade, or was it fifth? Her…

Green Acre #214: How Green Is My Garden

THE PRINCE has scattered three clumps of calla lilies behind the anemones. At least I hope they’re calla lilies. I’ve always wanted to waltz into the garden in something swish, wave a martini about and say, “The calla lilies are in bloom again.”…

Green Acre #213: Calla Lilies? Maybe.

AND WHAT OF anemones, LittleBird Janet, our fearless leader, asks. Such great fall flowers.
Ah, Janet:
Assumably*, the mention of anemones was spawned by my last column, on liriope, which, by the way, caused a foofarah on a local gardening site, a…

Green Acre #212: Falling for (Fall) Anemones

SOME YEARS AGO, it could be a decade, my friend Maggie and I were walking along Pennsylvania Avenue on a mild and lovely fall afternoon, the Capitol dome shining bright white behind us, when a young woman guided her dog over the low, looping iron…

Green Acre #212: Loving Liriope

I have never liked open plan living, much preferring doors, walls, closets, cupboards, basements, attics, garages – particularly now, when there’s nowhere to go, and the biggest thrill of the year, so far, is the reopening of the Safeway.…

Under the Hill of Clutter?

MY SISTER JEANIE once had a summer job, sleeping in a luxurious bed in the window of a New York City department store. Talk about exhausting work.
This was in the late 1940s, before I was born. While many of our family stories extend the truth with,…

Green Acre #211: Happy Quarantine Birthday

SOME PEOPLE reach for the Bible when life seems, shall we say, infertile.
I reach for Henry Mitchell.
Thinking I was out of thoughts for this week, I picked up The Essential Earthman, let it fall open wherever it would, and landed on the chapter…