C'est Inspiré is simply that - what is inspiring. Where the words end, images continue to speak. Seeing all that is around us, we seek some aspect of something that is life enhancing... something that you would like to be reminded of - to revisit. Something to capture and bring into your world, not leave behind... . That is why I take a camera everywhere; have spent countless hours organizing images in scrapbooks and pouring over them later to revisit the place, the people, the memory.
So, C'est Inspiré may be a single photo - or it may be 50, it may mean one thing to me, another to you - the meaning isn't important. Did it inspire? Did it make you smile? Did it bring back a pleasant memory? One or all of the above will do.
During a brief period of his life, the legendary art historian Bernard Berenson kept diaries where he wrote about how to see - and what he saw. These diaries were published under the title The Passionate Sightseer and edited by Raymund Mortimer.
Anyone, anywhere, anytime can be a passionate sightseer - just look.
MARTHA CLAIRE MOSS 1927-1990
Recently at my house in Aspen I was looking for something in my kitchen when I ran across a package of brown paper bags. I didn’t buy them, my housekeeper Arcelia must have. For what purpose I have no idea, but in an instant, upon seeing them, I had a flashback about my mother. I wondered, how many school lunches my mom prepared when I was growing up, there were five of us. Five children, twelve years of school minus a few holidays and snow days, countless hours spent making lunch, painstakingly wrapping them in wax paper packages precisely cut and folded and writing our names in her perfect lefty penmanship.
So I pulled five bags out of that drawer and wrote our names on them, and remembered those moments when every night late or at the crack of dawn in the morning my mother was sending us off to school with our favorites. Those were the days, as my brother Jeff remembers his elementary school power lunches of two apple butter and peanut butter sandwiches, with a Hostess cherry pie and four milks. He was, after all, a growing boy – she would say.
Thank you mom.
HAPPY MOTHER”S DAY.
May 13, 2012
If Thomas Jefferson were to walk the grounds of Monticello today, he would feel at home in the 1,000-foot terraced vegetable garden. Extensively and painstakingly restored under Peter J. Hatch’s brilliant direction, Jefferson’s unique vegetable garden now boasts the same medley of plants he cultivated in the early nineteenth century. The garden is a living expression of Jefferson’s genius and his distinctly American attitudes. Jefferson’s impact on the culinary, garden and landscape history of the United States continues to the present day.
Peter J. Hatch is Director of Gardens and Grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, where he has been responsible for the maintenance, interpretation and restoration of the 2,400-acre landscape at Monticello since 1977. He has managed several major restoration projects, and in 1987 established the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants. Peter Hatch is the author or editor of several books about the gardens of Monticello, and has served as an adviser and source of plants for Mrs. Obama’s White House kitchen garden, which features a discrete section that honors Thomas Jefferson.
Graced with nearly 200 full-color illustrations, A Rich Spot of Earth is the first book devoted to all aspects of the Monticello vegetable garden, and Hatch guides us from the asparagus and artichokes first planted in 1770 through the horticultural experiments of Jefferson’s retirement years (1809–1826).
Did you know…?
Jefferson experimented with over 330 varieties and some 99 species of vegetables.
Jefferson enjoyed a tradition of competing with some of his neighbors to raise spring peas. Whoever harvested the first spring pea hosted a community dinner that included a feast on the winning pea crop.
Unique among Virginia gardeners of his day, Jefferson cultivated a roster of unfamiliar species now taken for granted, including tomatoes, okra, eggplant, lima beans, peanuts and peppers.
Anticipating healthy living advice that would be extolled two centuries later, Jefferson wrote, “I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that…as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.”
Jefferson documented nearly six decades of horticultural triumphs and failures in his Garden Book, a diary he maintained from 1766 to 1824. This rich record made possible the most accurate early American garden restoration ever undertaken.
Peter Hatch’s A Rich Spot of Earth and Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book can both be found online through monticellocatalog.org
May 10, 2012
Never one to pass up a bookstore, I felt the magnetic force to Read it Again, Sam as I walked up the downtown mall in Charlottesville recently. A few out-of-print classics went home with me as gifts for friends, and part of my ‘stock’ for future birthdays and Christmas. Gardening volumes, wildflowers, Virginia recipes, a bio of Elizabeth David, and books on Lee Miller, Palladio and Audubon were amongst the cache. It is impossible to walk into a bookstore and walk out empty handed. An undeniable truth.
Read it Again, Sam
Dave Taylor, Owner
214 E. Main Street
Charlottesville, VA
On Tuesday April 24, Bunny Williams and I hosted a book signing for Phoebe Howard and her new book The Joy of Decorating. It was held at the Carolina Herrera boutique on Madison Avenue. We were surrounded with chic. Congratulations Phoebe, WHAT’S NEXT?
For a regular dose of decorating advice see Phoebe’s monthly column, “Dear Mrs. Howard…,” in Southern Living magazine.
May 9, 2012
