most asked-about: the wave hill chair

Every year, Better Homes & Gardens celebrates the movers and shakers, authors and bakers, designers and makers who push the design envelope in ever-beautiful ways. They're called Stylemakers, and this year we're highlighting nearly 40 of our favorite creative thinkers, dreamers, and doers. Here, you'll find a bit about each 2023 Stylemaker, plus their current projects and passions.

One of the most loved holidays, Easter brings together friends and families to celebrate the idea of rebirth, good defeating evil and light breaking through the darkness, as well as end the Lent season with delicious meals.

Yes, we’re talking about mint! The breath-saving, tummy-taming, taste-boosting mint. At Fantastic Gardeners, we love this refreshing plant, and why wouldn’t we? It is fragrant, easy to grow, and has many beneficial uses in culinary arts, medicine, and cosmetics.

Bob Dylan knew ‘You don’t need a weatherman. To know which way the wind blows……”

Britain is known for introducing us the best of the best — think Princess Diana, Harry Potter and fish and chips. Now we can thank the UK for bringing us a fantastic sun safety idea: the 3-hour-gardening rule.

“Laissez les bons temps rouler” is Cajun French for “Let the good times roll.” With the start of Mardi Gras, everyone will begin hearing that phrase quite often. Another favorite Mardi Gras tradition is the King Cake. But what is it, and why do they put plastic babies in there?

I first met Deb Perelman in my former life, when I worked for Martha Stewart. It was late 2007 or early 2008—a millennium ago in internet years—and we’d invited in a group of bloggers we admired to get better acquainted.  Deb sat to my left (and beyond her was Heidi Swanson of 101Cookbooks.com, with the founders of Apartment Therapy and theKitchn.com across the table, and more). I think that gathering is what crystallized my intention to start a website: such an inspiring group.But I digress. If you haven’t visited Smitten Kitchen, prepare to be entertained, educated, and called to action.DEB PERELMAN is a self-taught home cook, and is funny in that self-deprecating way I love (often using the cross-out strikethrough key on her editing dashboard to good effect). On the blog, and in the new cookbook, Deb invites you into her kitchen, and family, teaching you (her Tips section online alone is worth a visit, let alone all her recipes) while tempting you. You always come away hungry…until you get out the ingredients

We talked about the advantages of growing from seed, about extra-cooperative little plants like certain sedges and Erigeron (fleabane) that can beautify even tough spots like at the roots of trees, about using pots to announce garden areas and the signature plants of each of the distinct gardens at Wave Hill, too—like larkspur, to name one.the plants of wave hill, with louis bauerQ. Glad to have you on the show, Louis.A. Thanks for asking me.Q. Thank you for saying yes because I need a little help with my plantsmanship over here. [Laughter.] So for people who haven’t visited Wave Hill, which is a must stop for any keen gardener, do you want to just give us the teeny version of why we need tocome visit—a little bit about Wave Hill?A. Well it really i

The boys and I extend a huge thanks to Adrian, whom you can meet in the videos he’s been creating on The Post’s website. I loved this video about tomatoes, in which he combined visits with DC-area community gardeners and with our mutual friend Amy Goldman, the heirloom tomato queen who lives not far from me. Adrian’s recent story on Amy is a must-read as well.Also thanks to my very dear friend Erica Berger, who performed trick photography during the Washington Post photo shoot, so that (finally) a photo of Mother of the Frogboys that’s more recent than me at age 3 appears here.  I didn’t see any of Erica’s photos that ran in the paper, or others from her shoot including this one, on The Post’s website…just the story itself is there…

THE LATEST BOOK GIVEAWAY–which was a smashing success–ended at midnight Sunday, but there’s a “win” for everyone, it turns out. Collaborator and author Katrina Kenison and I asked commenters to tell us about books they’d relied on in times of transition…and wow, did they ever.

My choice was the Chaenomeles named ‘Cameo’ (above photo) as this double-flowered cultivar is called. It is variously identified as Chaenomeles x superba (a hybrid between the Japanese species C. japonica and the taller C. speciosa, a Chinese type, says the Missouri Botanical Garden) or simply C. speciosa (by woody plant expert Michael Dirr, author of the industry “bible” of woody plants). Dirr says it’s one of his favorite quinces, and “a long a prized plant in the Dirr garden.”Of course nobody agrees on the habit or size of ‘Cameo,’ either, with wholesale nursery Monrovia calling it “good for a mounding groundcover or on a slope,” at a mature size of maybe 3 feet high and 5 wide, about what Missouri Botanical lists. Nonsense, Dirr apparently believes, writing that it’s twice that. Hardiness? The opinion poll says Zones 4 or 5 to 8 or 9.As ever, with this kind of conflicting “expert” help, it’s a wonder that gardeners ever know where to place a plant or how much ro

By the time I met the Chuck, Matt and Joe Heidgen 17-plus years ago, when we were  working on the former Martha Stewart garden line at K-Mart, I at least already knew that when I said Geranium that I actually meant Pelargonium, because that’s the genus our annual geraniums actually are in. But I didn’t know that one could look, and smell, nothing like Grandma’s old standards, and perform roles in the garden she’d never imagined.Today Joe Heidgen, with his brother Matt, runs the business called Shady Hill Gardens—both garden center (below) and mail-order specialists–that their father founded in Batavia 40 years ago. It’s now in Elburn, Illinois (an hour or so west of Chicago). For more than 30 years, Shady Hill has gained a national reputation as Pelargonium specialists, breeding and propagating every color, shape, size and scent imaginable (and then some). And good news: they sell them mail-order, too.Li