Books |
At Home in the Garden
Carolyne Roehm
By
Published: Nov 09, 2015
Category:
Art and Photography
I met Carolyne Roehm for media reasons — at the height of Wall Street prosperity in the mid ‘80s, I wrote a piece about her and Henry Kravis, her then husband, for New York Magazine. She was on an amazing trajectory, only a few years removed from her childhood identity as Carolyne Jane Smith, of Kirksville, Missouri, where her father was a school principal and her mother a teacher. Now she was a fashion designer beloved by women whose days began with lunch. As for Kravis, his private equity firm had recently bought a little company called Nabisco for $31.4 billion, the highest price ever paid for a commercial enterprise.
On a magazine cover, they looked like Reagan-era royalty.
The title of that article — “The Working Rich: The Real Slaves of New York” — only hinted at the glossy surface and flawed reality of those years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Looking back, I see the title was prescient — for everything she got, she lost something. Her husband’s teenage son was killed in a car accident; her fashion business was shuttered and her marriage ended. She bought a house and devoted herself to its decorating and gardens; it was destroyed in a fire.
But out of the ashes, Carolyn Roehm dug in. She wrote a dozen books, took 30,000 photographs, became the darling of women who identify with her pluck and vision. And now she’s unleashed “At Home in the Garden,” a 304-page, huge (11” by 14”), 7.4 pound object. I’ve got a brown thumb, but this looks very much like a book that gardeners will get and give in large numbers at the holidays. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here.]
“At Home in the Garden” is an unapologetic Valentine to one of world’s most spectacular gardens. When the Kravises bought Weatherstone, a 1765 mansion in Connecticut, it had a garden, but nothing worth preserving — of its 59 acres, 45 were cornfields. Now there are three formal gardens, rose gardens, parterre gardens, pool gardens, and topiary rising to the heavens like Brancusi’s Endless Column. You get the idea. In her words: “a garden that threatened to give Versailles a run for its money.”
Many design books and shelter magazines are house porn. And if your first reaction to “At Home in the Garden” is that this house and garden would make good shelter for the poor after the revolution, you could make that case — the book certainly looks like house-and-garden porn. But while I’m as anxious to redistribute income as the next member of the 99%, I would urge my brothers and sisters in the struggle to make an exception for Carolyne Roehm. Not because she’s my friend, but because these gardens don’t exist because she was bored, needed a hobby and decided on a whim to make Art out of Nature.
In her childhood, Roehm spent long hours in her grandmother’s garden. In recent years, she’s withdrawn from a frantic social life to pursue “a passionate partnership with nature.” Those aren’t casual words for her; she sees parallels between romance and gardening. In an interview, she was asked about “necessary” luxuries. Her response: “lots of cut flowers.” Her favorite decorating accessory? “A mass of cut flowers.” Get the idea? She may look too perfect to get her hands dirty, but real perfection for her is in the 59 acres that exist purely because she had a vision that just wouldn’t quit.
Want a sample? Click here.
And for her a sense of her self-deprecating wit, candor and intelligence, click here.
My favorite picture? It’s not of the spectacular flowers, which are often photographed life-sized. I once owned a house in the country, in a horsey town with estates that had driveways as long as streets. I had the small landowner’s petty jealousy. But I consoled myself with one phrase: “geese on a rich man’s lawn.” And there they were at Weatherstone, a line of geese, clearly not potty-trained, making their editorial comment on the beauty around them. Like the imperfection in a Persian rug. Like life.
