We have first century A.D. blue Roman fresco with birds and leaves and gardens that my mother and I love, and we found it in Switzerland. A similar period piece is a fresco fragment with Cupid , such a little angel.

Many of these were the first pieces my mother began collecting. One of the most precious is an 11th-century glazed black tea bowl with rainbow colored spots.

This Buddha represents the meeting of East and West. When Alexander the Great invaded Eastern Asia he brought with him a Greek influence that had a profound effect on the way Asian statues would come to be sculpted. This is a prime example.

Most of the pieces served a function, such as this bronze oil lamp in the shape of a wrestler. So there's form, function and above all beauty.

Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.

Gardening, I told myself, is the most sociable of hobbies. The very nature of one's field of activities demands an audience. No one wants flowers to blush unseen or waste their sweetness.