Books: Carolyne Roehm's *At Home In The Garden*

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Carolyne Roehm. For many people in the United States and abroad, her name is synonomous with exquisite taste, grace, naturalness and beauty.

Today, dear readers, we’d like to share with you about her sumptuous, large!, and extravagantly beautiful new book, *At Home In The Garden* – an intimate look at her creation, over the past 3 decades, of her 59 acre garden at Weatherstone, her 1765 country home in Sharon, Connecticut.

But, first, a little backstory – for those of you who may not know her.

Born in Missouri to schoolteacher parents, her love of gardening grew from spending many hours learning from and helping her grandmother in her garden.

At 13, though, Carolyne knew she wanted to be a fashion designer, and after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in St. Louis, she headed to New York City. There, through a series of connections, she met and went to work as Oscar de la Renta’s assistant for 10 years, and then operated her own couture fashion label for several more years after that.

During these years, she met and married financier Henry Kravis, which led her to Weatherstone. When they divorced, she kept Weatherstone, and now we are the fortunate ones.

Be prepared to have your soul nourished by Ms. Roehm’s words, watercolor paintings and the symmetry and sensousness of Weatherstone’s gardens, so beautifully documented by over 400 of her own images in her new book, *At Home In The Garden.*
What you realize as soon as you open *At Home In the Garden* and begin to read it, is that it is not a *typical* gardening book.

First, it is written in the same style that has drawn legions of readers to her blog: intimate, natural, and disarmingly honest. Secondly, as you read it, you soon realize you are learning not only about gardening, but about life, because Ms. Roehm shares such valuable wisdom about what gardening has taught her about accepting what life presents you and savoring that, versus wishing to bend life to fit your ideals.

Secondly, she takes you through her garden, as she would take you through her home. She devotes a chapter to each section in her garden and shares how she uses several sections of her garden as literal extensions of her home’s rooms. She talks about each section and what went into its creation, what mistakes she’s made, what she’s learned from her mistakes, etc. For anyone who loves to garden, her advice is priceless beyond compare.

Below is a view of one section of her garden in the fall. The white structure you see is her writing studio.

As you would expect, the pictures in this book, all taken by Ms. Roehm herself, are a feast for the eyes.

In *At Home In The Garden*, you will see not only many images of Weatherstone’s gardens, but also many images, like our favorite below, of how Ms. Roehm uses the flowers to create the floral arrangements for which she is so well known.

You have to love a woman who has custom book bindings made in shades of green for all of her favorite gardening books!

And, before we continue, we’d like to thank Ms. Roehm for not only sending us 2 review copies of *At Home In The Garden*, but also for donating a copy to the Bernice Bienenstock Furniture Library in High Point, North Carolina.

Ms. Roehm’s new book will be enjoyed by the citizens of High Point and the surrounding cities in North Carolina, and the designers, scholars and students who visit and use the Library and also enjoy sitting outside in the Pat Plaxico Sculpture Garden, a side view of which is shown below.

One of the great surprises of Ms. Roehm’s new book are her watercolor paintings, dispersed throughout, like the one below. As she shares in the book, painting is a relatively new passion of hers, but just like everything else she touches, in her hands, it is turned into beauty of the highest order.

Even when she lost everything in Weatherstone, built in 1765, due to a fire in January of 1999, she was able to re-envision it and turn its interiors into the magnificent spaces they are today, as seen in the rendering below of her grand salon.

Ms. Roehm, we know Hadley Court’s readers will love your new book and we hope many of them will think of it first when they think of holiday gift giving.

Congratulations, too, on it already being #1 on Amazon in the category of *Gardening Books*!

Readers, you can purchase Ms. Roehm’s new book on Amazon, but may we encourage you to use Amazon’s SMILE program when you do, where 5% of your purchase price is donated to the charity of your choice?

Or, please support your local independent book store and let them know of its popularity so they have copies on hand for the holidays.

Thank you!

We close today with this watercolor by Ms. Roehm from her new book, *At Home In the Garden*.

We love her inspired choice of Whittier’s poem to sum up her life philosophy:

“Give fools their gold and knaves their power,
Let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall,
Who sows a field or trains a flower
or plants a tree, is more than all.”

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