Day at the Beach Essentials
flowers

A Day at the Beach

If you’re hard at work in the sticky-hot city with no vacation plans in sight, doesn’t a day at the beach sound like heaven? A few hours to frolic, to think, and to do absolutely nothing: that could change your whole perspective on life. With that in mind, here are some items to help make your day at the shore as memorable as possible. They are all available online, so no effort required; just put those fingers to the keyboard, […]

candle holders for flowers
flowers

Repurposing Candle Holders with Flowers

Candles come in so many unusual shapes and sizes now that they deserve to be repurposed. They make brilliant containers for flower arrangements, providing so many different shapes, colors, and textures to work with that you might never need to buy a vase again! I even stuck in a yogurt container and votive as inspiration for all the things we have around that house that can make charming containers for flowers. Here are seven I’ve collected just in the last […]

Windowsill Gardens on Americas-Table.com
flowers

Windowsill Gardens

Windowsill gardens can be sad affairs.  You know what I mean – wilted parsley, yellowed sage, some herb you never heard of and wouldn’t know how to use even if it was healthy, and a gnarled mint plant that can’t push out enough leaves for even one mint julep.  Edible plantings should be lush, gorgeous, and bursting with life – and they certainly don’t need to be relegated to the kitchen.  I walked into a shop in Georgetown the other […]

Spring Beauties on Americas-Table.com
flowers

Spring Beauties

There’s a delicate pink wildflower called spring beauty, which I used to search for after school while playing in the woods of our farm. I hadn’t seen one in decades, and then yesterday, while walking the dogs in Dumbarton Oaks Park, I was amazed to find a range of them thriving underneath a stand of beech trees. It brought back memories of other spring wildflowers – May apples, dogtooth lilies, wild violets and Jack-in-the-pulpits – tucked into hidden spots beside […]

table with cake and flowers
formalities

It’s Going To Be A Boy!

One of my friends is expecting a baby next month, so a group of us got together to give her a shower. It’s her first child, and they know that it’s going to be a boy, so we went with a classic blue-and-white theme. We invited guests for 4 PM, and served tea and a baby blue cocktail, along with tea sandwiches, a hearty salad, and lots and lots of sweets – cake, cupcakes, cookies. There are so many clever […]