If you were lucky enough to sit down and enjoy the New York Times Design Magazine like me yesterday, you probably came across the great article about Judy Kameon of Elysian Landscapes. Judy’s career has lead her many places, but ultimately, she is now a very successful garden designer to the stars. Her client list includes Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs and The Parker Hotel in Palm Springs. I love her desert-chic style. It’s simple and elegant, but clever and quirky all at the same time.

Check out the entire NY Times article for more details. Enjoy some of my favorite images of Judy’s work below from her website.

Images from Pandorea, workflo and amalric.

Once the sun went down, the stage was reset for the M Shanghai String Band on the conservatory lawn. I expected classical music, but was delightfully surprised by rockin’ Bluegrass! An altogether fabulous evening in the Bronx!

Beautiful photo of the conservatory by uptick from Flickr.

Barber goes on to discuss the effects of large retailers like Home Depot and Walmart who bought starter plants from industrial breeding operations and the importance of starting plants locally from seed (if possible). He also discusses the need for agricultural education with the surge of home-gardening throughout the country. All of us who have home gardens, myself included, must educate ourselves on how to prevent and detect plant infection so that diseases like blight don’t develop and spread. Lastly, Barber discusses the need for the food community to support sustainability and natural diversity.

Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, where Barber buys his produce for his restaurants, offers a variety of gardening classes which teach all the theories he discusses in his article. I took one this past winter before I started my own vegetable garden, and encourage others to do the same.

Lovely photo from the Union Square Farmer’s Market by Lindsay Beyerstein from Flickr.

Here’s a snippet: “Eating was once an enjoyable, relatively uncomplicated experience; the biggest dilemma was how much butter to put in the mashed potatoes. No more. In this post-Pollan, Food, Inc., locavore-aware world, your dinner plate, like it or not, is a minefield. Beyond the enduring concerns about calories, artificial ingredients, and, of course, taste, there are now a host of politically minded food anxieties. Is the chicken free-range? Is the salad from a labor-friendly farm? Was the coffee shade-grown? Sometimes it seems the future of the planet is riding on your hamburger.”

Next to each image in the article is a list of symbols identifying why that food should be avoided. For instance, we should not eat bananas because: big carbon footprint, unfair labor practices, pollution, ecosystem damage, corporate monopoly and overfarmed. Instead, we should eat local apples while they’re in season. Makes sense to me.

Read it, along with The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. They’ll all make you think twice about what you put in your body.

I was particularly intrigued by an article by Morgan Clendaniel about a new 6,000 square-foot rooftop garden ontop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Here’s a snippet: ”New York City has very little land that is not covered with buildings, forcing New Yorkers to find innovative solutions if they want to keep their agricultural production truly local. But while some people grow a few herbs on their fire escapes, Ben Flanner is transforming an entire industrial rooftop into a living garden. Atop a defunct bagel factory in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood—a Polish enclave more known for its pierogies than its organic tomatoes—Flanner dropped 200,000 pounds of dirt on 6,000 square feet of rooftop (by crane), and in so doing brought new life into a mostly concrete neighborhood….Flanner used to work at E-Trade, but decided he had had enough of the corporate life: “About a year ago I came to the conclusion that I’d learned what I needed to learn from the jobs that I’d had,” he says. “And I decided that it was time to put together a plan to move on and continue my learning in a new realm.” He had always had an interest in farming, but the recent wave of interest in local produce and sustainable agriculture helped give him the courage to go out on his own. With the help of Annie Novak, his partner on the farm who also works at the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and visits to other farms to learn from more experienced farmers, he has started to master the techniques and knowledge necessary for a working farm.”

This is one of many urban farming articles I found interesting. Check out Good’s website, or get a yearly subscription to the magazine for $10.