This New Furniture Line Achieves the Most Elegant Barbiecore Look Yet

As someone both blessed and cursed with a keen sense of smell, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to lose it. To never again inhale, for example, the sweetness of a rose. To be forced to go without the spicy, spring perfume of witch-hazel, or the fresh-earth scent of newly dug potatoes, or the sharp, vegetal tang of tomato plants softly baking in a hot glasshouse in high summer.

Flowering shrubs can grace your garden, adding color, interest and sometimes fragrance to the home landscape. For the biggest, showiest flowers, you’ll also need to take into account the sun exposure of the garden site. But never fear, there are flowering shrubs for landscaping that like sun and others that like shade.

There’s an ugly truth behind those beautiful alstroemeria, dahlias, and roses we adore—80 percent of them are grown overseas and imported on gas-guzzling jets—often soaked in pesticides—despite the fact that they can be grown right here in the U.S. These blooms are often called “fresh” cut flowers, but they’re anything but. 

When the weather is fine, a backyard patio becomes an outdoor living room for many homeowners. But when the weather is not fine, the poor furniture bears the brunt of it.

We’re all used to recycling the cardboard and soda cans that come through our homes, but did you know you can recycle your home’s used water, too? (Don’t worry; we’re not talking about the really dirty stuff!)

Here, at the beginning of 2022, some of us may resolve to make meaningful life changes. At midnight on December 31st, marketing campaigns switch from ‘indulge in holiday cheer’ to ‘new year, new you.’ For me, after the past two years, the wellness industry can keep their diets and gyms, and the self-help industry can sell their ‘ten-step program to be the best version of me’ to someone else. These days, I’m over here just trying to be.

I bought the plant more than a decade ago, for the showiness of its (then) variegated red, green and yellow foliage and its touted use as a groundcover in moist shade (including plunged right in a pot in water, apparently). Certain that I had acquired a treasure, I was terribly upset when it didn’t return from underground after its first winter with me. Dead, I reported in my newspaper garden column at the time. Gone.It was another year before the chameleon turned on me again, and resurfaced. Its resurrection was cause for celebration. Not dead, not gone!I guess you know the rest of the story if you’ve ever grown an

Michael Wojtech of Know Your Trees dot com and author of “Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast” (Amazon affiliate link) can answer those questions, plus this one: Can you actually learn to identify trees by their bark (an especially useful skill now through spring, when many are leafless)? Hint: The answer is yes.Michael left a 15-year business career to pursue his love of natural history and writing, and earned his Master’s in Conservation Biology from Antioch University New England. His thesis, on tree bark, became the basis for the field guide. Though the book’s plant ID section covers trees of the Northeast, much of the ma

MELISSA CLARK IS ONE OF US. The prolific cookbook author and “The New York Times” food columnist has a homegrown Dahlia (her young daughter); knows a rutabaga from a turnip (so many people don’t!), and is intrepid in harvesting year-round farm-and-garden gleanings—if not in her own backyard, then in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Farmers’ Market, where she has been a year-round customer for years, come hell or ice age. With her latest, “Cook This Now,” the hard part will be figuring out which of 120 recipes to start with. Win one of two copies I’ve bought to share—and get her recipe for Carroty Mac and Cheese right now.

You may recall my previous conversations with Thomas, the co-author with Claudia West of the provocative 2015 book “Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes.” Even though we both have worked around plants for many years, it’s as if Thomas sees them differently from the way I do, in a sort of super-savvy botanical 3-D. He doesn’t see them as mere decorative objects, but astutely reads their body language for clues to who they want to grow with (or not) and how to put them all together successfully.I love how he sees, and thinks, as you can glean from our lively Q&A, where he says things like this:And this:Though not intentionally so, the Times article turns out to be especially timely—and not just because it’s early spring, and we gardeners need to make smarter choices

“Something odd has to happen for hairworms to be on soil or vegetation, instead of in water, so at first when I got those calls I thought: It must be earthworms,” says Hanelt, a Research Assistant Professor with the Center for Evolutionary and Theoretical Immunology in the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “But I asked one caller to send me some—and lo and behold, they were hairworms.”It took years between the time Hanelt saw his first nematomorph, while on a survival-training hike in high school, until he actually knew what it was.“There they were out in the middle of the forest in winter, in a bucket of water,” he recalls. He saved the strange animal,

You can order the plan, a pdf, from Wave Hill’s shop. My pairs were adapted from there–made in cedar, not pine; the arms slightly longer; the wood slightly thicker and so on–and a savvy carpenter can adjust the angle of the seat and back before screwing everything together, to be more upright or less so. Follow the plans to the letter…or have some fun with them. Order the Wave Hill chair plan by calling the Wave Hill Shop at 718.549.3200 x 249, or email jenahb at wavehill dot org.Want them painted? My expert woodworking neighbor recommends using Benjamin Moore Aura exterior on top of an oil-based primer to help stop any tannin bleed (assuming that the material is cedar, which is the best choice if you plant for long life of the chairs, or to leave them outdoors in winter). If there are knots, use oil-based Binz primer on the knots only.You may recall my recent interview