Unlike most flower-arrangement books, which rely on expensive and often nonseasonal flowers from florists, this book presents an alternative that is in line with the "back to nature" movement. This is the first volume to showcase how to be inspired by nature's seasonal bounty and bring that nature into the home through floral arrangements.
From the well-known lifestyle photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo and Nicolette Owen of Brooklyn's Little Flower School, "Bringing Nature Home" presents a portfolio of unique and original floral arrangements directly inspired by the seasons and the local environment, with sources ranging from farmers' market offerings to the backyard garden. Presented through lush photography that also showcases the beautiful interiors the arrangements are created for, this is as much a decorating tome as it is a floral-arrangement guide.
A how-to section offers advice on the selection, trimming, and care of the arrangements and on repurposed and unique containers, making this book practical as well as inspiring.

Introduces an original take on floral design that teaches us to see the world anew Based on Lindsey Taylor’s popular Wall Street Journal column ‘Flower School,’ on its surface this book demonstrates how Taylor creates stunning but achievable floral arrangements inspired by works of art. Riffing on works by a diversity of artists across mediums, periods, and styles, including Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julie Mehretu, Sheila Hicks, Willem de Kooning, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Stella, Salman Toor, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Kerry James Marshall, among others, Taylor inspires readers to interpret the palettes, compositions, brushstrokes, and mood of the art in flowers, and shares florists’ trade secrets for building beautiful arrangements. Through this meditative practice of looking intently at art and nature, readers learn, in the words of David Hockney, ‘to really look,’ and to really see the world.

Until now, an invitation to the New York home of style icon Deeda Blair has been a rare privilege reserved for the fortunate few. In her first book, Blair opens her doors and invites readers in, sharing her coveted recipes and ideas for entertaining and setting tables honed over the course of a remarkable, illustrious life. Blair also reveals to readers how to develop their own uniquely personal style and taste through stories and examples gleaned from the friends and mentors who have inspired her, from decorator Billy Baldwin to designer Hubert de Givenchy and collector Jayne Wrightsman. Central to the narrative are six fantasy meals, each accompanied by a menu, recipes, table settings, and floral arrangements that are inspired by the people and places among them the Haga Pavilion in Sweden, Pavlovsk Palace in Russia, and Givenchy s chateau in the Loire Valley that have shaped Blair s own inimitable and envied taste and style. Each meal is set in Blair s exquisite home and accompanied by Ngoc Minh Ngo s evocative photography of the imaginative table settings Blair has created for her timeless dishes that defy culinary trends and are of the moment in their surprising beauty, seasonal ingredients, and ease of preparation. Accompanying Blair s favourite 80+ recipes are personal instructions, often enhanced by her own charming drawings of her serving suggestions. An Introduction by writer Andrew Solomon beautifully chronicles the arc of Blair s storied life as wife of U.S. ambassador William McCormick Blair Jr. in Denmark and the Philippines, her years in Washington, DC, and later in New York. Blair is one of the last great American swans, revered for her beauty, fashion, and elegance qualities captured in photos by Helmut Newton, Horst, Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol, and Juergen Teller that are featured in this book. Renowned design/style writer and tastemaker Deborah Needleman collaborated with Blair on this book, capturing for the page Blair s vision for entertaining with fantasy and enchantment, as well as her reflections on life and how her experiences have influenced the way she lives, works, and entertains.

From the publication of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" in 1726 to Josef Boruwlaski's "Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf" in 1788, eighteenth-century English literature, art, science, and popular culture exhibited an unprecedented fascination with small male bodies of various kinds. Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays drew packed crowds, while public exhibitions advertised male dwarfs as paragons of English masculinity. Bawdy popular poems featured diminutive men paired with enormous women, while amateur scientists anthropomorphized and gendered the "minute bodies" they observed under their fashionable new pocket microscopes. Little men, both real and imagined, embodied the anxieties of a newly bourgeois English culture and were transformed to suit changing concerns about the status of English masculinity in the modern era.

"The Little Everyman" explores this strange trend by tracing the historical trajectory of the pre-modern court dwarf's supplanting in the 1700s by a more metaphorical and quintessentially modern "little man" who came to represent in miniature the historical shift in literary production from aristocratic patronage to the bourgeois fantasy of freelance authorship. Armintor's astute close readings of Pope, Fielding, Swift, and Sterne highlight little recognized aspects of some of the classic works and writers of the period while demonstrating how, over the course of a single century, the little man became an "everyman." Intervening in current cross-disciplinary discussions of literature and art, the history of science, extraordinary bodies and disability, and eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies, Armintor makes a major contribution to our understanding of how questions of masculinity and gender, the sociology of marriage, and the economics of commodity capitalism converge in central literary works of the English eighteenth century.

Deborah Needleman Armintor is associate professor of English at the University of North Texas and the co-editor of "Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Vol. 2."

"Armintor mounts an historical argument that dwarfs move from serving as representatives of aristocratic court culture to models of the bourgeois man of feeling that was so prominent in the culture of the end of the century. In the process, she teases out the rich and ambiguous reciprocity between morality and physicality, between power and febrility, between the big and the small, between sexuality and mentality." -Barbara Benedict, Trinity College