Garden Therapy

I HAVEN’T POSTED in a few days because I got home from Spain and was hit with a bad case of ‘What now?’ I walked into my lovely Prospect Heights pied-a-terre, now fully furnished, decorated, and organized, and had nothing much to do. It would be different if I had a job, say, or children at home. Then my next steps would be clear.

I felt empty, lost. My apartment was silent, except for the raindrops and NPR. I usually crash a bit when I come home from a trip, physically and emotionally. This wasn’t a total crash, just a malaise, exacerbated by jet lag, gloomy weather, and a low-grade fever. I watched two seasons of Californication in 3 days.

This morning, though, dawned sunny and cold. I drove out from Brooklyn to my cottage in Springs in the company of a friend, which made the trip fly. I arrived to find my garden, especially the four beds around the front door, covered with brown leaves, looking wintry. Brooklyn’s daffs and forsythia are starting to bloom; here at the end of the Long Island, we’re weeks behind.

One thing that is blooming spectacularly: an old pieris

I made some lunch, procrastinated a bit, and then, for the first time since last fall, got my work clothes and rubber boots on. I went down to the basement and brought up the wheelbarrow, two rakes, a trowel for digging frost-heaved (deer-heaved?) perennials back into place, a pruner, and a grass shears.

Then I spent a couple of hours doing early spring chores: chopping dried four-foot-tall miscanthus (ornamental grass) down to the ground, cutting last season’s shriveled foliage away from salvia, catmint, and other perennials, raking fall leaves off the beds and carting them to the compost heap in the woods. The deer had done a lot of the cutting back for me, saving me the trouble altogether with the liriope (lilyturf).

I took note of casualties. There have been a few in the shrub department, for reasons unknown, including an abelia ‘Little Richard’ I really liked. My memory is another casualty, apparently. I can’t recall what was where and what things are called. For this garden, I haven’t kept obsessive records, though I do have a Zip-loc bag of plant labels which I will consult as the season progresses.

On the bright side, I discovered underneath the shriveled foliage, the tiny green leaves of emerging catmint, ladies mantle, ligularia, and other things the deer find completely unpalatable. A sign that things are happening as they should.

Below: Catmint, ladies mantle, pulmonaria

As I worked, the sun moved across the sky and into the woods. I kept going until it dropped behind  the fence of the neighbors next door and my fingers were frozen. At which point I noticed I had gone from enervated to exhilarated, and had stopped worrying about my ‘next step.’

Garden therapy does it again. I’m happy to be in Springs, happy it’s finally spring.

Feng Shui Problem Resolved

MY SISTER ASKED ME A COGENT QUESTION THIS EVENING: “So how did you solve your feng shui problem in the bedroom?” Oh, that! I guess I owe her, and y’all, an explanation.

Taking to heart the sage advice of MazeDancer, Katy Allgeyer, and others on this blog, I moved the bed yet again, so it’s back in the niche, below, and out from under the oppressive ceiling beam. Truth to tell, the night before I moved the bed, I slept on the living room couch. I actually felt the pressure of the beam bearing down on my body and simply couldn’t spend another night there. Maybe it was suggestion, maybe imagination, maybe fear of forces unknown….at any rate, since I moved the bed, I’ve slept like an effing log.

I’ve added a white wool shag rug from IKEA and window blinds from Pearl River. With the new credenza for my office supplies, and the velvet-upholstered chair, top, I won a couple of years ago as a door prize at a Metropolitan Home magazine party, the room is getting quite comfortable. Especially when compared to the stark “before” of two scant months ago, below.

Color Quandary

OK, IT’S NOT A LIFE-ALTERING DECISION, but I’m surprisingly perplexed about what to do re the paint color for my bedroom walls. Me, the expert who successfully chose colors sight unseen for the living room and bathroom, below, when my landlords offered to paint any color I wanted before I moved into my new pied-a-terre, a brownstone garden floor-through in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, last month (that’s right, it’s not an apartment, it’s a pied-a-terre, and I’m gonna keep saying it.)

Benjamin Moore’s Dalila in the living room, above, and Ben Moore’s Tropicana Cabana in the bathroom, below

For the bedroom, I had been thinking red/orange, and I’ve now spent about $100 trying 9 samples from 4 different paint companies:

• Benjamin Moore. I started out with 3 wimpy pale pinks that are definitely not me; moved on to Coral Gables, more assertive but still too pink; then tried Poppy, an overly aggressive red I couldn’t possibly live with on a daily basis.
• Ralph Lauren. Hot Orange, way too dark; Mesa Sunrise, a maybe.
• Farrow & Ball. Orangery, which is more like yellow ochre. No.
• Pratt & Lambert. Pale Carnelian — love it for a chair, not a room.

All this has required several trips to Pintchick, one to deepest Brooklyn (Eastern Paint on Flatbush Avenue is the only Brooklyn store that carries the full line of Ralph Lauren paints), 2 trips into Manhattan (one to Saifee in the East Village which also carries RL, and another to London Paints in Chelsea for the Farrow & Ball).

See what I’m up against in the bedroom, below?

I’ve looked at my sample patches in every kind of natural light from dim to dark (it’s a north-facing bedroom under a deck, above), as well as artificial. Not one of my samples is calling out to me as the right color.

These are among the considerations:

• I want something to brighten the room and make it less dreary
• The paint mustn’t be too dark. Not only is the room already dark, it’s unfair to my landlords (as a landlord myself, I’m always pissed when I give people permission to paint whatever color they choose, and they choose deep purple)
• It has to work with the sunflower yellow living room, as the door between the rooms is almost always open
• It has to make me happy, lift my spirits, and envelop me with a sense of well-being, constantly

Tall order for a can of paint? Well, yes…hence the quandary.

My friend Debre thinks I should just keep going in this vein, use up all my samples for a kind of crazy quilt effect. No, my dear, I’m not doing that. Meanwhile, time’s a-fleeting. I’m already in the second month of a one-year lease (though I hope to stay much longer).

I’ve got to choose something, and soon. Maybe a nice blue or green?

Hanging Pictures Salon-Style

UPDATE, 4/29/13: I’ve recently added more art and moved the pictures closer together on my salon-style wall, above. It’s much more successful now, I think, with less air between them.

PRODUCTIVE WEEK SO FAR, settling in to my Prospect Heights pied-a-terre. With the help of a friend, I carried out a plan to hang pictures “salon style,” covering a wall from top to bottom — an assortment of original art and prints acquired over the years at antiques shops and estate sales, mostly. (That’s it, above, though in need of further refinement, not to mention straightening).

Only later did I realize I was sub-consciously trying to emulate the Barnes Foundation, which I visited for the first time in August. That’s the incredible collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art soon to be rudely displaced from its longtime home, below, in a Neo-Classical mansion just outside Philadelphia, to a new site on Benjamin Franklin Parkway that’s almost certain to be more sterile and institutional. I’ve even copied the yellow walls, though the art I couldn’t copy: Albert Barnes had Modiglianis, Cezannes, Renoirs, etc., up the wazoo, and interspersed his paintings with collected metal objects and African sculpture.

The so-called salon style of picture-hanging goes back centuries in European tradition, long before the contemporary gallery style — hanging art in horizontal eye-level rows — came into being.

Monet’s dining room at Giverny, below, another contributor to my current infatuation with yellow, has art hung salon-style in the far corner.

The picture below, from Apartment Therapy, makes me feel I ought to have even more pictures and hang them closer together.

Read more about salon style in this article from Portland Monthly:

For two centuries or more, art was enjoyed salon-style, with big and small pieces mixed together and displayed from floor to ceiling. In European museums, art often is still shown this way.The term “salon-style” derives from the famed Parisian art school École des Beaux-Arts, which, in the mid-17th century, began to exhibit the paintings of graduating students in huge public shows.

The era’s artistry, of course, is now mostly relegated to the Louvre, but the style of hanging pictures is again fashionable in galleries, museums, and especially homes. There are really no rules; all it takes is a good eye—or more to the point, confidence in your eye.

I don’t know about confidence, but I do know it helped to lay the pictures out on the sofa in rough approximation of the proposed arrangement, and to start at the bottom, using the sofa back as a guide to a more-or-less even line. Then we just winged it. The OCD part of me is driven a little crazy by the inconsistency of the negative space between pictures and the desire to constantly straighten them (don’t they sell some sticky thing you can put on the backs of pictures to prevent their moving around?) Still, there’s something very satisfying about a methodology that allows you to get all your art up there in one fell swoop.

No vember

WHEN I WAS ABOUT 9, my uncle taught me this ditty:

No birds No bees No flowers No trees

No wonder…November.

I still find it amusing, even though it’s not true. The goldfinches are still at the thistle feeder. I saw bees burrowing in the catmint just the other day. My cimicifuga sent up about a dozen white bottle-brush flowers, and even the rhododendrons, below — which I thought didn’t bloom this year because the deer had eaten all the buds — have a few stunted magenta flowers on them, months behind schedule. The trees are still pretty leafy, and seem particularly brilliant this autumn.

Perhaps because I’m leaving? Tomorrow I’m heading to Brooklyn to start my experiment in leading a double life — the Hamptons/New York City circuit that so many take for granted, but for me is a whole new chapter.

On Monday morning I’ll be in my Prospect Heights pied-a-terre, awaiting delivery of most of the furniture I put into storage a year-and-a-half ago, when I came out to live in East Hampton full-time. That was by default, as some of you may remember, when the Brooklyn place I was to have moved into around the same time I closed on this Hamptons cottage fell through at the last minute.

Above: Awesome sarcococca, male of the species

I feel like I have unfinished business back in Brooklyn. I’m getting excited about volunteering at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, taking $10 yoga classes at Shambala, going to BAM more often, hearing some klezmer music, shopping at Sahadi. But most of all, having a city home again, furnished with city stuff. The orange Ligne Roset chairs, the steel and glass coffee table, the Nakashima-esque side table my son made, the inlaid 1950s Italian cabinet we bought in Tuscany and had shipped home, the 8-foot-long beige chenille sofa with cat-scratched arms. Maybe inanimate objects shouldn’t matter so much, but somehow they do. Even more than memories, I think, they’re about identity. It’s been hard sometimes, these past 18 months, to remember who I am in a new place, new house, surrounded by new (pre-owned, of course, but new to me) stuff.

November will not be boring. After settling into Brooklyn, I’m off to Maui for a week (yes, I know, too bad). I’ll be exploring the island with my daughter, who lives there. I’ve got our itinerary planned out. No modern resorts; we’ll be staying in vintage B&Bs. I’ll visit some botanic gardens and flower farms and historic houses and maybe even go to the beach. Then I’m heading down to Philly to cut a hole in a wall that should make one of the apartments in my Queen Village building much pleasanter and more livable. Thanksgiving will be upstate with lots of cousins.

It won’t be until December that I begin to figure out how this pied-a-terre thing really works.

Photos by Debre DeMers