Innehållsförteckning för May/June 2023 från Veranda

“Some of the most exquisite flowers are the most fleeting, but I find that no reason for disregarding them.”—CONSTANCE SPRY To British floral artist CONSTANCE SPRY, flower arrangements represented the ultimate creative expression. She found inspiration everywhere, from moody Dutch masters paintings—as in her 1951 rose and carnation arrangement above, based on a painting by 17th-century artist Willem van Aelst (inset)—to seemingly mundane plants like dried grasses and branches (right). Her ethos inspired this issue, merging art with the natural world and celebrating gifts of the garden as powerful forces in craft, innovation, and design. However fleeting their blossoms, the influence of flowers blooms eternal.…

I FIND USING BASKETS CAN MAKE the grandest rooms look homey and lived-in,” says acclaimed gardener, floral designer, and collector Cathy B. Graham. “Think how glorious Chatsworth House looks filled with baskets overflowing with flowers and plants.” Indeed they are the ultimate equalizer in decorating, appearing in Grade I English estates like Chatsworth and primitive cottages. In materials from willow to rattan, bulrush to pine, woven baskets are the hunter-gatherers of quotidian life up and down the social stratus, playing a vital role in nearly every civilization in history, predating even pottery. Yet deep in basketry’s DNA is a beauty of form and craftsmanship that has long captivated collectors and fueled the imaginations of makers—and the momentum appears no sign of abating. The latest generation of designs feels ripe for…

The Woodland Textile Artist “I was always pressing flowers, taking long walks in the forest,” says London-based fabric artist Natasha Hulse of her childhood on her family’s estate in Breamore, England. After stints as a digital textile designer, she found a way to reclaim those sylvan days through her 3D botanical linen appliqués. Hulse hand-paints, cuts, and embroiders individual petals, stems, and leaves, then attaches them, bloom by layered bloom, to headboards, lampshades, and other furnishings. Commissioned work is often deeply personal; one recent piece featured the client’s favorite primroses and cosmos, as well as fabric she’d inherited from her mother. These layers, Hulse says, “become a sacred thing.” natashahulse.com The Architect of Flowers As a child in India, Sourabh Gupta brought life to his yardless house by planting cuttings in…

Tendilla, Spain VERANDA World’s Most Beautiful GARDENS 2023 I FOUND SOMETHING AMAZING—you must come see,” Spanish interior designer Luis Puerta instructed his longtime collaborator landscape designer Álvaro Sampedro. As it turns out, recalls Sampedro, amazing was perhaps an understatement. Just 50 minutes outside of Madrid, Puerta had discovered a 17th-century palace in near ruin in a little village named Tendilla close to Guadalajara. Behind it, a “jungle, an incredible paradise,” notes Sampedro, in need of rescue. There were hints of an orchard, creeks, and a kitchen garden, he recalls, but whatever overarching design there may have once been had long succumbed to neglect. Near the outset of the six-year restoration project that followed, Sampedro made a serendipitous discovery of his own. “I uncovered old garden lines similar to the design…

Charleston, South Carolina PARTERRE GARDENS are to be enjoyed from above, designed so the lady of the house could gaze from a piazza,” says Ben Lenhardt, pointing to the broad second-story porch of this 1743 home he and his wife have fully restored. Though small, his Charleston garden amplifies a refined lyricism, more exquisite chamber music than robust symphony. With boxwood-lined precision and plantings true to those found in the 18th-century Carolinas, it’s a celebration of history and preservation as much as form and finesse. There was no preexisting garden, just a lovely “borrowed landscape” of live oaks, massive magnolia, loquat, dogwood, and hollies surrounding the property. Lenhardt, a retired CEO who serves as chairman emeritus of The Garden Conservancy and board member of the Chicago Botanic Garden, embraced the…

Sometimes a house speaks for itself. “This house has a big voice,” says New York–based designer Charlotte Moss, a house whisperer of the first order. Indeed the Tudor manse in Houston’s tony River Oaks neighborhood boasts a Texas-sized accent, full of flourish and distinction, where Moss raised and lowered the volume, with decor decibels ranging from hushed pink in a tea paper–cloaked entryway to fully amplified garden room and formal living and entertaining spaces. “The home is beautifully scaled in an elegant, old-world way. It has nice proportions so the furniture reflects the architecture—all very classic,” says Moss, her Southern accent still recognizable despite decades of living in New York. Her clients, Texas natives, had long had their eye on this landmark property surrounded by magnificent oaks, and when the…

ONCE UPON A TIME a shabby little inn sat in a copse just a block from the Lake Michigan shoreline. In desperate need of a fairy godmother, the original 1922 structure had been added onto and renovated over the years and not to its advantage. It was overwrought and misunderstood: Think glass block windows, whirlpool baths in the bedrooms, and dropped tile ceilings. But like any down-and-out protagonist, beauty glowed within. “There was this Alpine fairy-tale feel to the project,” says Chicago-based designer Summer Thornton, whom the new owners hired to reinstate the inn’s allure for seasonal visitors. “It’s in a heavily wooded area, so there isn’t the openness and brightness of a beach house. Rather it’s eclectic with potential for a little country fantasy or even a quirky English…

WHEN KARL LAGERFELD visited a garden, he went to be inspired. And never more so than when the fashion designer visited the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2013 and stepped into Ulf Nordfjell’s gold medal garden for Laurent-Perrier. That year, the Swedish botanist and landscape architect leaned into the romantic, painting in oranges and yellows, soft pinks and blues. Lagerfeld took notes on the spot and went on to base his entire next collection on it—a Chanel parade of blossoms in couture form. Nordfjell told me this story when speaking to one of my classes in New York, and that dance between a garden and grace has never left me. In fact, it is central to my latest project at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Virginia. As I…

WHAT COMES TO MIND IF I asked you to name a flower memory? It’s a question I’d never pondered until a couple of years ago, when Charlotte Moss (featured on page 114) was speaking about her book Flowers (Rizzoli, 2021) at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. The designer took us on a stunning pictorial journey through her best flower memories, ranging from festivals in France and country gardens in England to historic garden tours in her native Virginia. Her passionate descriptions of each varietal’s color, fragrance, and environment were so vivid I felt as though I was experiencing her memories firsthand. That is until Moss’s stories summoned a rather Proustian flower memory of my own. The memory, from my time studying abroad in Provence, began with a steep climb past rows…

BUNNY WILLIAMS “I was impressed by the gardens’ varieties of richness, with nice pockets of intimacy woven throughout the landscapes,” says the renowned interior designer whose Connecticut home and garden graced our March/April 2023 issue. PETER LYDEN “The best gardens don’t overwhelm the architecture; instead they allow the surrounding structures to breathe,” says Lyden, president of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. “Our winners balance formality with wilder, more romantic moments.” METHODOLOGY VERANDA editors chose the top 18 entries for blind judging by Williams and Lyden. For information and submission guidelines for the 2024 awards, see veranda.com/most-beautiful-gardens-2024.…

East Sussex, England STEP ONE: Plant 550 native trees. That was how fine art photographer turned gardener and ceramicist Emma Burrill began a decade ago, transforming nearly seven acres of scruffy horse pasture into the garden of her dreams. Charmed by the property’s old buildings, Burrill and her husband gave the farmhouse a modern renovation and turned the old stables into an art studio—but the fields ignited Burrill’s fantasy of a prairie-style haven of biodiversity. Her passion is rooted in the playfulness of gardening. “The process keeps me calm and sane,” she says. “I love the slowness of it, like watching 40-centimeter little whips I planted 10 years ago grow into 30-foot trees.” Burrill also marvels at wild orchids colonizing amid her planted perennials and grasses. “To have it half-planned…

Yves Saint Laurent’s Full-Skirted Show At the debut of Yves Saint Laurent’s 1976 Opéras-Ballets Russes collection, a procession of peasant styles floated down the runway. The theatrical couture (opposite) whisked patrons to a Russian opera, reborn in Goujou’s voluminous faience and floral silhouette. Here, the vase’s highly detailed blue and white peacock design mimics the energy of the patterned silk blouses, while blush garden roses, watermelon Yves Piaget roses, and deep purple Astrantias celebrate his jewel-toned lamé and chiffon skirts—an operatic masterpiece more than 40 years later. Christian Lacroix’s Mediterranean Holiday The south of France influenced illustrious paintings like Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (above left) as well as the vibrant couture of Christian Lacroix, whose childhood home of Arles inspired his debut collection in 1985. Like Van Gogh, the designer…

Like a grandfather oak stretching its canopy over the forest, tree-of-life patterns branch out in spectacular scale. The flowers and foliage in Braquenié’s Ashoka pattern (near right) are entirely hand-embroidered on a striking rose-colored linen ground. The effect? Paradise remastered. Mixing machine and hand stitching brings patterns inspired by older embroideries into the modern fray. Rose Cumming’s Fleur de Jardin (middle) comes from a dusty document in India, reborn with tactile flowering vines on a cotton ground as precious as the original hand-spun cloth. From gorgeous knotting to hand-stitching, sampler-like variety appears in single fabrics like Osborne & Little’s Puzzlewood (top center and bottom right). Its playful woodland pattern is first digitally printed on textured linen and then embellished with French knots, “pistil stitches” (long French knots), and chain stitches…

TO LABEL IT flower arranging would be like calling sculpture a bit of stone chipping. Ikebana—“living flowers,” roughly translated—honors the innate sublimity of plants while mastering their very shapes in precise placement. With origins in sixth-century Japan, this esteemed cultural tradition has spawned myriad, rigorous schools of philosophy and technique. Enter a new generation of creators who both embraces and challenges that massive legacy. In Santa Monica, California, Japanese-born Naoko Zaima teaches ikebana (as did her great-grandfather) and has just published her first book. Up the coast in San Francisco, self-taught Amanda Luu creates breathtakingly modern creations based in ikebana at Studio Mondine (Luu is also a published author). As these up-and-coming stars show us, ikebana is more vital than ever—everywhere. “Ikebana is something you can spend a lifetime with…

Concord, Massachusetts ALL THAT HAS BEEN is visible and clear,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, beloved bard of early America. This classic Georgian Revival along Concord, Massachusetts’s Authors Ridge is patterned after Longfellow’s house in nearby Cambridge, and when a young family bought the circa 1900 manse, its timeless beauty was indeed visible and clear. Yet the former glory of its nearly six acres was decidedly less so. “It was overgrown, with no real sense of order or plan,” says Dan Gordon of Dan Gordon Landscape Architects. Plus a 2016 microburst had decimated many of the existing trees. Tasked with reenvisioning a landscape that both complemented and enhanced the stately architecture, Gordon and project manager Patrick Taylor created definition by regrading the front elevation and introducing a stone retaining wall and…

Goudhurst, England LANDSCAPE DESIGNER Jo Thompson could tell the overgrown, shabby gardens surrounding the 19th-century Ladham House had once been well loved. When the Italianate mansion’s new owners, a young family, asked her to reinvigorate the grounds, “we did so with a sense of respect to what was there while adding a fresh contemporary twist,” says Thompson. For instance, she kept the structure of the existing double 260-foot-long borders but relaxed their formality, infusing a gentle zigzagging rhythm of mixed-height perennials and traditional pink roses—“such a British thing”—interspersed with grasses for an airy feel. “There are extraordinary magnolias and mature trees framing these borders,” says Thompson, who built on this air of woodland mystery by introducing “pops of deep wine red” at the borders’ sunnier end, with wilder roses as…

ON A BREEZY SPRING EVENING, Ruth Runberg sets a long table aglow with candlelight on the front porch of Charlotte, North Carolina’s Duke Mansion. With this orchid-laden dinner, the founder of R. Runberg Curiosities is saluting the finale of her annual spring show, an unveiling of unusual objects and other rarities from around the globe. “I’m driven by discovery,” says the shop owner, a former fashion buyer for Barneys and Browns. “Everything I buy is made by hand. That human element gives a sense of soul to each item. And I’m drawn to antiques and vintage pieces because I like to imagine what they’ve seen and the stories they could tell.” For this occasion discoveries new and old mingle down her table like affable guests of honor. Hand-poured wax bust…

A TISKET, A BASKET Pages 22–23 Pedestal basket: Dans-la-Main for Well Made Home; wellmadehome.com. Doric box: Dovetusai; dovetusai.it. Wicker Champagne bucket: Dior; 1-800-929-3467. Square wicker cachepot: Larger Cross; largercross.com. Osier teacup and espresso cup and saucer: Z.d.G.; zdgofficial.com. Medici sconce: Atelier Vime; ateliervime.com. Tole potted topiary: Casa Gusto; getthegusto.com. Baytree bracket: Amanda Lindroth; amandalindroth.com. Pages 22–30 Restorer’s woven rattan tea matting: Van Dyke’s Restorers; vandykes.com. Paint color: Ocean City Blue by Benjamin Moore; benjaminmoore.com. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Pages 34–38 Fade to Black, Anchor, Forest Floor, and Klamath Roman clay paints, $84 for 5 kilos; portolapaints.com. EMBROIDERY BY THE BUNCH Page 42 Vases: Julia B.; juliab.com. Wire: The Floral Society; thefloralsociety.com. Trug: June; junehomesupply.com. COUTURIERS IN BLOOM Page 86 Kravet Couture 33886 fabric, to the trade; kravet.com. RENAISSANCE IN THE PINK…