Just a few blocks from the nearby summer dahlia stand I frequent is a modest house with thin red and grey bricks, taupe siding, and a recessed front door. It would be unremarkable except for its extraordinary front garden. Its owners have surrendered conventional green grass to an insurrection of rosebushes. They grow without rhyme or… Read more »
I’m recently returned from a weekend trip to Charleston, South Carolina. The heinous history of American slavery is plainest and rawest in the South, where whites fought longest to preserve it. And so I think of the region as something like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire: an aging beauty, beguiling and a little perverse, with an… Read more »