Not long after she married financier and philanthropist Ogden Mills in 1882, Ruth Livingston inherited her childhood home in Staatsburg, New York.  With views of the Catskill Mountains, the house at Staatsburg perches over sweeping lawns that stop just short of the Hudson River. The Livingston family had been prominent landowners in the Hudson Valley […]

A few months ago I was walking the aisles of the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, inspired by all the great ideas on display. But I had a garden conundrum of my own, and I couldn’t figure out how to solve it. Twenty-two years ago I had planned and planted my garden. Two long […]

Located precisely on the dividing line between the states of New York and New Jersey is a greenhouse and gardens that helped shape American garden history. It is the garden of Helena Rutherford Ely at Meadowburn farm in Vernon, New Jersey. She was the much celebrated author of A Woman’s Hardy Garden, first published in […]

In his New York rooftop greenhouse, Rex Stout’s fictional armchair detective Nero Wolfe had three rooms for a wide variety of orchids. No insect entered that greenhouse. But although Wolfe was an obsessive hybridizer, it was bees, wasps and flies, far more than orchid fanciers, who had created his collection’s extravagant range of shapes and […]