LETTER FROM THE EDITOR-August 2010

by Rebecca Falzano, Managing Editor,  Photography Irvin Serrano

The backyard I enjoyed growing up was a big, grassy one lined with trees and bordering a golf course.

The daily discovery of golf balls in the pool and the occasional near-miss while playing in the tree house kept things interesting. My parents were perpetually working on some landscaping project—planting flowers, arranging fieldstones my dad would pick up from the side of the road, tending to vegetable gardens. Summers were always verdant, and to this day, my memory of them glows a brilliant shade of green.

Today, with a small patio instead of a grassy lawn and a CSA share instead of my own vegetable garden, I get my green fix on Portland’s promenades or in the beautiful backyards of homes we feature in Maine Home+Design. This month, we bring you two stories whose pages are abloom with green—a profile of Rick Campbell of Gnome who built his landscaping business from the ground up (In His Element, page 50), and a peek at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in all its summer glory (Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, page 83). There’s also the carefully considered landscape architecture of our two feature stories—a summer home in Prouts Neck (Midsummer Dreams, page 66) and a modern, renovated artist’s studio on the coast of southern Maine (Modern Honored, page 54).

To balance out all of this green, we take you on board the Bequia, a 90-foot sailing yacht with a jaw-dropping interior (A Spirit of Home, page 33). And for a different type of “green,” this month’s Trend Watch highlights stylishly sustainable wares for your home (page 40).

At the end of this fleeting Maine summer, may you find yourself barefoot on a lush lawn or under the shade of a leafy tree somewhere. And if you can’t enjoy the greenery firsthand, then we invite you to live vicariously through our pages.