In Print: Making a Splash: Better Homes & Gardens, June 2023

June 2023 Issue of Better Homes and Gardens featuring a lushWoodstock garden Story written by Melissa Ozawa. Poolside table is by Bonetleng.

If you have a minute, this story goes back to when I first moved to the Catskills and was desperate to create a garden (like my grandparents always had when they lived here generations ago). I had no idea then how easy they made it look because after a few tries I realized that my soil was terrible for planting veggies, annuals, or even perennials, and the deer and other critters (including seemingly invisible ones!) wipe things out overnight, often as soon as they emerge from the ground. So many a lovingly cultivated seedling was a write-off once they were transplanted into my poorly amended, shady, boggy soil.

For this shot we included a chair by FN furniture.

After a few quick searches on google I discovered someone named Dean Riddle, a local gardener and garden designer who lived in a magical home near Phoenicia, and who’s multiple gardens had been published in Martha Stewart, and Gardens Illustrated, among others, and who had written a memoir about gardening. I quickly snatched up all the info about him I could find and poured over a new genre of photography I had never tapped into: enter Garden Photography! Once my little garden grew a little more robust, I realized that I liked photographing gardens just as much as I liked planting them, if not more so.

Before long I had an instagram series called #100daysofgardening which presented all my early attempts at garden photography… and soon after I was booked to photograph a garden in Connecticut for Martha Stewart Living Magazine. I was overjoyed, and later reconnected with the writer from that story, at which point I mentioned my adoration of Dean Riddle. It turns out she knew him, and the rest is history. I’m now happy to call Dean Riddle a friend, and garden guide, and overall wonderful person to know. It’s with great joy that I am able to share this story, which we actually photographed two summers ago (yes print happens WAY ahead of time!) with that very same writer (the knowledgable and kind Melissa Ozawa) and a great art director (Ryan Mesina).

Once the story goes live online I will include a link here.

In the meantime, please enjoy these tear sheets! I look forward to the next garden Dean! <3

Photos by Winona Barton Ballentine, Words by Melissa Ozawa