Portfolio

A grande dame of designer showcases at the Jersey Shore, the annual Ruth Newman Shapiro Cancer and Heart Fund show house is going contemporary this year. "Meadows Edge," a 22-room fieldstone-and-clapboard home in Linwood, provides the setting for 22 designers from New Jersey and Pennsylvania to go a little more mod in their room presentations than in the past. Martha Hatrack and Christine Betsy of Kroungold's Furniture in Marlton took a dated great room and gave it hip leather Barcelona chairs and a zebra rug in a lounge area.

Gardeners can't ever buy enough high-quality, interesting plants and all manner of related stuff, which is one of many reasons to head for the fourth annual GardenFair at Winterthur this weekend. Seventy plant and garden exhibitors from 15 states will be selling everything from tools and outdoor furniture to herbs and trees. Free gardening lectures, how-to demonstrations, and workshops also run throughout the fair. Hank Schannen, owner of Rare Find Nursery in Jackson, N.J., in the northwestern tip of the Pine Barrens, is a GardenFair veteran.

Most of us decide what to make for dinner, then choose the seasonings to go with it. Not Jeff Cox and Marie-Pierre Moine, authors of a new book called The Cook's Herb Garden (DK Publishing, $18). They do it the other way around. Regardless. If you like herbs and you like to cook, you'll find plenty to absorb in this small book - not just how to grow, harvest, and store 120 different herbs, but how to use them in interesting ways in the kitchen. Example: A friend gave me some sorrel last year and I've never done much with it. Here, I learned that what I have is garden sorrel, Rumex acetosa , which is tangy and sharp, as opposed to French sorrel, Rumex scutatus , which is milder, more lemony and succulent.

It's obvious from the sumptuous spaces in Bunny Williams' Point of View: Three Decades of Decorating Elegant and Comfortable Houses (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $60) that the interior designer's clients come from the monied set. But it's also clear from her surprisingly down-to-earth text, which offers decorating wisdom along with a memoir of the people and things that shaped her as a designer, that she doesn't believe a big bankroll is required to create a welcoming home. "I don't want people to look at this book and think, 'I could never live in a house like that; I could never afford it,' " says Williams, who spent two decades with legendary design firm Parrish-Hadley before going out on her own. "It doesn't really matter if a chair cost $50 or $50,000.

The American Art Pottery Association encompasses all periods and styles, president Arnie Small says. So the weekend events connected to its annual convention, being held for the first time in the Philadelphia area, will reflect the wide-ranging interests of collector and dealer members - from arts-and-crafts-era pieces to 1920s and '30s Rosewood and Weller to studio pottery from the latter half of the 20th century to the work of today's notable potters....

Back in June, Joann Taylor thinned out her irises in Portland, Ore., packed about 18 pounds of extra rhizomes into a box, and shipped them off to Cheltenham Township, where she grew up. These irises are special, descended from a variety planted by John McDermott, Taylor's great-grandfather, more than a century ago on the 49-acre estate belonging to the Elkins family, for whom the Cheltenham neighborhood Elkins Park is named. The estate, known as Elstowe Manor, was on Ashbourne Road. McDermott, an Irish immigrant, was the Elkinses' gardener, and as Taylor recounts the story, he loved these flowers so much he planted them at his own house on Beech Avenue.

Here's a pruning book written for amateurs like us: The Pruning Answer Book: Solutions to Every Problem You'll Ever Face, Answers to Every Question You'll Ever Ask , by Penelope O'Sullivan and the late Lewis Hill. With 365 pages and a title like that, you'd expect every problem and question to be included. Not quite. But this little gem from Storey Publishing ($14.95) - and I do mean little - packs a lot into a modest 41/2-by-61/2-inch frame. It includes when and why to prune; right and wrong techniques for flowering, ornamental, evergreen, deciduous, fruit, and nut trees, as well as vines, ground covers, and hedges.

What assets are liquid, generate income, reduce overall risks and outperform stocks in some years? Bonds - an important component of an "all-weather" investment portfolio that will perform well in good and bad markets. In 1994, however, many savers discovered that bonds - even government bonds - are risky. Bonds did worse than stocks or cash. The average taxable bond mutual fund lost more than 3 percent, or nearly double the 1.7 percent average loss for general stock funds.

Jeff Gillman already has a reputation as a garden troubleshooter, having separated truth from myth and fiction in earlier books about garden remedies, organic gardening and environmental policy. Now comes Decoding Gardening Advice: The Science Behind the 100 Most Common Recommendations, which is set for publication by Timber Press in January ($16.95) and can be preordered online. Gillman, who grew up in Pughtown, Chester County, is a horticulturist and entomologist who teaches at the University of Minnesota.