In this exquisitely lush volume, lifestyle legend Carolyne Roehm celebrates her gardens as outdoor living rooms, revealing how she chooses the plants, flowers, and layouts; how she entertains guests with gorgeous table settings and breathtaking arrangements; and how she savors the hours among the blooms. As Carolyne Roehm says, “It’s as simple as this: a garden is like love...a place you venture into with hope, energy, excitement, enchantment, and the greatest of expectations.” For Roehm, the garden has always been more than a canvas for beauty. A place where her devoted efforts bear glorious results, the garden is not only a reflection of what has inspired Roehm, but also a font of inspiration from which she draws--for her astonishingly lovely arrangements, her gracious dinner parties, and her new passion for interpreting her flowers in vibrant watercolor paintings. Each of the gardens at her historic Connecticut home, Weatherstone, has been lovingly crafted to serve as an outdoor living room, where the hours may be passed at work, alone, or enjoyed with company. In the Parterre Gardens bordering the south side of the home, Roehm created a fantasy of snow in spring with white tulips and Sargentina crabapple trees. All of the varietals in her Rose Garden were selected for their pulchritude and divine scent, as well as for their ability to bloom twice to satisfy her insatiable thirst for roses. And when the stream through her property offered only an unsatisfying trickle, Roehm replaced it with a river of hostas, primula, bleeding hearts, and rodgersia that sweeps through her Shade Garden. As Roehm accompanies us on the first-ever tour of these marvels, she shares witty and candid stories of the unexpected triumphs and the sometimes-crushing defeats. And always, there is her desire to return to the garden—to tend, to mend, or to plant anew. A garden is like love, Roehm claims, and indeed, this lavishly illustrated volume is a testament to an enduring, complex, unquestionably personal, and deeply passionate amour.

At the Bottom of the Garden is a history of fairies from the ancient world to the present. Steeped in folklore and fantasy, it is a rich and diverse account of the part that fairies and fairy stories have played in culture and society. The pretty pastel world of gauzy-winged things who grant wishes and make dreams come true—as brought to you by Disney's fairies flitting across a woodland glade, or Tinkerbell’s magic wand—is predated by a darker, denser world of gorgons, goblins, and gellos; the ancient antecedents of Shakespeare's mischievous Puck or J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. For, as Diane Purkiss explains in this engrossing history, ancient fairies were born of fear: fear of the dark, of death, and of other great rites of passage, birth and sex. To understand the importance of these early fairies to pre-industrial peoples, we need to recover that sense of dread. This book begins with the earliest manifestations of fairies in ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. The child-killing demons and nymphs of these cultures are the joint ancestors of the medieval fairies of northern Europe, when fairy figures provided a bridge between the secular and the sacred. Fairies abducted babies and virgins, spirited away young men who were seduced by fairy queens and remained suspended in liminal states. Tamed by Shakespeare's view of the spirit world, Victorian fairies fluttered across the theater stage and the pages of children's books to reappear a century later as detergent trade marks and alien abductors. In learning about these often strange and mysterious creatures, we learn something about ourselves—our fears and our desires.

There’s a strong biblical connection between people and trees. They both come from dirt. They’re both told to bear fruit. In fact, arboreal language is so often applied to humans that it’s easy to miss, whether we're talking about family trees, passing along our seed, cutting someone off like a branch, being rooted to a place, or bearing the fruit of the Spirit. It’s hard to deny that trees mean something, theologically speaking. This book is in many ways a memoir, but it’s also an attempt to wake up the reader to the glory of God shining through his creation. One of the first commands to Adam and Eve was to “work and keep” the garden. Award-winning author and songwriter Andrew Peterson, being as honest as possible, shares a story of childhood, grief, redemption, and peace, by walking through a forest of memories: “I trust that by telling my story, you’ll encounter yours. Hopefully, like me, you’ll see that the God of the Garden is and has always been present, working and keeping what he loves.” Sometimes he plants, sometimes he prunes, but in his goodness he intends to reap a harvest of righteousness.

Fridays From the Garden is a collection of recipes and stories from a year in a verdant Los Angeles garden. But it's more than that, too. Tracing the trajectory of Flamingo Estate, this cookbook is the story of a house that became a brand, and a brand that became a rallying cry for regenerative farming and Pleasure from the Garden.Spurred from a simple desire to support struggling farmers during the pandemic, founder Richard Christiansen turned his bookstore into a CSA box operation, which quickly grew into a weekly Friday ritual for the greater Los Angeles community - a chance to connect with the marvels of the natural world in the midst of a global pandemic.Each Friday, this box would feature beautiful, delicious produce, recipes inspired by the week's harvest, and a personal note from Richard, urging subscribers to cook a meal for someone they love. This cookbook is a collection of over 150 of those stories and recipes -a monument to the pleasures of the Flamingo Estate garden, the people that keep it buzzing, and the ways in which Mother Nature takes care of us when we take care of her.With stories by Richard Christiansen, a foreword by Martha Stewart and recipes from Chefs Ella Murphy, Jo Kim & more. Featuring the photography of Drew Escriva, Pia Riverola, Christian Högstedt, François Halard, Larkin Donley, Andrea D'Agosto, Adrian Gaut and John Von Palmer.

At Play in the Garden of Stitch provides ways to think about how thread and fabric can bring depth to composition, texture to emotions and line to ideas. Kovarik has won numerous awards for her densely machine-stitched art in which the quilting line is used to draw intricate patterns and pictures. Simple exercises encourage the reader to approach each day with a curious mind willing to make a mess of expectations, embrace the wonky by letting the thread lead, and think in thread while making careful observations of the world. Heavily illustrated with examples and finished art the book provides quilters and artists with new ways to approach this medium.

At the Garden's Gate is the story of one woman's personal journey in creating a meadow, when going "green" wasn't an everyday word. As the author follows her passion to learn about medicinal and edible plants, a meadow evolves that supports growth-both natural and personal. During this process, she reconnects with her Native American heritage, learning the wisdom of the Medicine Wheel and its teachings. This is a story of partnership with the land, a story of personal discovery and love of nature. Stories-our personal narratives-have meanings on many levels. Using story in the ancient ways of her Native American elders, the author offers insight, wisdom and conveys an impetus to create connections with nature in our daily lives. We are on the cusp of creating a new Earth, one of collaboration, of cooperative effort that recognizes our hearts. One our soul can align with. The garden becomes our centering place. It beckons us through a gate of new understandings and growth. The garden's gate offers us a doorway into our deeper self. The garden's path offers a way to remember and to be with self, in stillness, meandering onto unknown pathways that can twist and turn but are filled with such beauty. For that is who we are, co-creators, one with all of creation.

A journey into a realm beyond imagination gives one man a glimpse into his own spirituality through messages of faith, hope, and love. A man lies down for a normal night of sleep and inexplicably awakens to find himself in a surreal garden bursting with fantastic aromas and colors. A succession of “tour guides’ come and go, helping him to interpret the landscape’s fragrant messages, each one a clue on the journey to discover his true self, and, ultimately, the Creator of the Country Beyond. “One night, a 48-year-old man undergoes a truly odd experience. He awakens in a strange world, where he is able to discuss theology with such entities as a Scotsman and an Englishman, meant to be the well-known Christian theologians George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis . . . Phillips brings off this unexpected premise surprisingly well . . . a wonderful starting point for some great debate.” —Library Journal