GREEN WITH ENVY

The secret life of plants has taken root in our columnist's psyche-and decor. How do some know how to unearth the power of foliage to make a room come brilliantly alive? Let's dig deep.

- By RITA KONIG

I went to visit a friend of mine in New York the other day. She has a beautiful apartment on the Upper East Side overlooking the Met. In the deep window reveals were generous terracotta pots with wonderfully rangy green geraniums sitting in front of the windows. The plantings did something so unusual to this (extremely well-appointed, Jacques Granges-decorated) apartment: They brought a soft, gentle calm of a kind that you don't find very often in the city. The geranium is a humble plant, and the terracotta pot nothing exceptional, but to have these at scale you must have a greenhouse. When I inquired about them I discovered they had in fact come from the country. How perfectly Annette de la Renta! (Or Bunny Mellon, or Hubert de Givenchy, or Debo Devonshire.) A geranium in a terracotta pot is unassuming, yet it still requires a greenhouse, gardeners, and transport from afar. I don't know why, but that gives me some sort of excited chic envy—the unattainableness of it combined with the unflashiness of it.