PRODUCED BY CATHERINE LEE DAVIS , MARIO LÓPEZ-CORDERO, AND DAYLE WOOD | WRITTEN BY MARIO LÓPEZ-CORDERO AND KAITLIN PETERSEN

Special Report: The Luxury of Land

NATURAL STATEVeranda has long celebrated the intersection of indoor and outdoor living. And these days, there’s more awareness of our natural environment than ever before, which has spawned a

new generation of stewards. In this special section, we showcase the people, places, and things that embody the joy of pastoral pursuits, from the latest in the farm-to-table movement

and the reclamation of old building materials to urban dwellers returning to country living.

Alpacas in Peru, where textile designer Sandra Jordan is helping to preserve a herding way of life (see next page).

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GREEN ACRES Serenbe, a 1,000-acre residential development about 30 miles from Atlanta, utilizes a model that turns urban sprawl on its head: Four walkable neighborhoods recall villages in the English countryside, with amenities and an abundance of outdoor activities. “The way we’ve typically preserved land, in small one- to five-acre parcels, is actually much more destructive to the landscape,” says cofounder Steve Nygren. “Here, we’re creating places where neighbors know neighbors, steps away from wildflower fields, pastures, and forests.” serenbe.com.

Saving Grace Leading textile houses are creating goods with rich back-stories, working to save wildlife and indigenous ways of life. In Peru, where rare Prima Alpaca fabrics come from a baby alpaca’s first shearing, Sandra Jordan supports education and sustainable housing for herders in remote Andean villages. sandrajordan.com. The vicuña, whose luxe fleece was once reserved for Incan emperors, now thrives on Loro Piana’s nature reserve, also in Peru, after the company saved the species from near extinction. loropiana.com. And in the Mexican highlands, Maddalena Forcella works with artisans in Oaxaca and Chiapas, who raise “cotton deer” like family pets and turn their wool into custom handwoven rugs. maddaforcella.com.

ABOVE: The stables and paddocks at Serenbe, which offers a robust equestrian program. LEFT: More than 15 miles of wooded trails wind through the 1,000-acre residential area, built on 40,000 acres of protected land.

LEFT: A Maddalena Forcella handwoven rug. ABOVE: Yarns are woven from the wool of the Chiapa sheep, or “cotton deer.”

Vicuñas roam high alpine regions of South America.

FROM LEFT: Sandra Jordan Prima

Alpaca in blue and an ivory bouclé;

Loro Piana’s vicuña.

ONE MAN’S TREASURE

New York’s latest street artist is floral designer

Lewis Miller, who employs city trash cans (and iconic

landmarks) as oversize vases to create beguiling, flash-style

arrangements. They may have a short shelf life, but they enliven the

Manhattan streetscape to the delight of residents and tourists

alike. lewismillerdesign.com.

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LEFT TO RIGHT: Agrar ian’s Backyard Bee hive kit includes tools for harvesting honey; williams-sonoma.com. A chicken coop on an Atlanta estate. The Shiitake Mushroom Log is inoculated with spores; shopterrain.com.

ABOVE: Brook lyn’s Eagle Street Rooftop Farm. RIGHT: A Houdan Pullet hen, a French heritage breed known for its unique feathers and fluffy crest.

Greener PasturesLuxe chicken coops, mail-order beehives, grow-your-own-mushroom kits—the latest source for top-shelf ingredients is the backyard.

FIELD WORK You don’t need to grow your own salad to reap Mother Nature’s bounty: Foraging is as old as civilization, and experts around the country lead top-notch tours where participants harvest directly from the landscape. In New York, Leda Meredith guides people through the overlooked treasures of the urban jungle, with stops in Central Park and Prospect Park. ledameredith.com. Asheville, North Carolina’s No Taste Like Home takes guests into the surrounding countryside to harvest edible flowers and greens (left). notastelikehome.org. ForageSF introduces novices to San Franciscan lar gesse: crabs, eels, and sea weed. foragesf.com.

Farmers’ market regulars know that a grocery-store egg can’t hold a candle to the freshly laid variety. And commercial-grade honey? Try drizzling your yogurt with amber nectar you’ve harvested from bees that are buzzing around your own garden. Honey, you’ll never look back. The farm-to-table movement has spawned its latest trend, and it’s turning the American backyard—complete with chicken coops and DIY kits for everything from beekeeping to shiitake cultivation—into the most accessible green market imaginable. And if the idea of feeding chickens or clipping green beans conjures memories of dreaded childhood chores, think again. The rewards can be as beautiful as they are plentiful: mottled Japanese quail eggs, anyone? Even within the tight confines of big cities, commercial and communal vegetable gardens are thriving on rooftops and creeping beyond their tiny neighborhood plots. The movement redefines what it means to be a locavore, and the results are truly delicious.

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TEA PARTY Sold in elegant ivory-hued tins, the small-batch tisanes of Leaves and Flowers bring farm-to-table principles to tea. Fresh herbs are sourced from local growers, then dried and mixed into distinct blends—such as Sweet Rush (below), with lemongrass, ginger, and rose petals—and packed in a Berkeley, California, workshop.

GIVING TREES Family-owned wallcovering company Phillip Jeffries has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation to launch PJ Plants, which pledges a new tree for every order that comes in. The initiative marked the company’s 40th anniversary, and it’s already making a difference: PJ Plants has contributed more than 50,000 trees to help reforest Alabama’s Choccolocco State Forest. phillipjeffries.com.

Pioneers of ChangeRolex funds groundbreaking environmental philanthropy projects around the world.In 1976, Rolex was looking for a meaningful way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its Oyster chronometer, the world’s first waterproof watch. The results were the biennial Rolex Awards for Enterprise, which fund pioneering environmental and scientific projects that make the world a bet-ter place. Among the 2016 award winners are efforts to solve problems in all corners of the globe—reducing poverty and preventing deserti-fication by planting acacia trees and promoting sustainable farming in Tunisia; helping farmers in the Himalayan highlands overcome spring water shortages, which can stunt crop growth, by constructing immense conical ice mounds; and finding new, community-based ways to reduce water and soil pollution in rural China. Evaluat-ing the long-term impact of each undertaking was a key component of the selection process—a fit-ting criterion for a company that has been keeping time for more than a century. rolex.com.

Sweet Rush herbal infusion, $32; leavesandflowers.com.

CLOCKWISE FROM

ABOVE: Sustainable farming protects Tunisian farmland from the encroach-ing Sahara Desert. In the Himalayas, man-made ice mounds provide water for crops dur-ing dry months. Recycling helps prevent river pollu-tion in rural China.

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REQUIRED READING: RURAL PURSUITSMarc Appleton’s Ranches: Home on the Range in California ($65, Rizzoli New York) mines the breathtaking landscapes and architecture of a fading way of life in the American West. Shelburne Farms: House, Gardens, Farm, and Barns ($65, Rizzoli New York), by Glenn Suokko, tracks the rich history of a Gilded Age Vermont estate built by a Vanderbilt heiress that has since evolved into a leading nonprofit dedicated to sustainable farming. The Garden of Peter Marino ($85, Rizzoli New York) offers a peek at the leafy acreage that forms the starchitect’s own private Long Island oasis.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Monticello cuff, $11,800; Camy French wire earrings, $7,200; Pareo earrings, $29,000; mishnewyork.com. A slice of the salvaged wood. The trees once stood beside Monticello’s west-lawn portico. Thomas Jefferson. An engraving of a tulip poplar bloom, c. 1743.

American SplendorA treasured piece of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello gains a glamorous new life.When a pair of Thomas Jefferson’s beloved tulip poplars reached the end of their 200-year lifespan and had to be removed from Monticello’s west lawn, Charlotte Moss, a member of the historic Char-lottesville, Virginia, estate foundation’s board, knew just who to call to help preserve them. “There was a chunk of wood waiting for me one day in the studio,” says jewelry designer Mish Tworkowski. Moss’s brief: Could the principal of Mish New York use the sal-vaged material to create a collection to benefit the historic estate? Tworkowski’s work combines a rever-ence for the timber’s natural grain with a modern American aesthetic and a healthy respect for its source. “We treated the wood exactly as if it was a blue diamond,” explains Tworkowski of the materi-al’s rarity. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

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Along the two-hour drive between Charleston and Savannah, Georgia, lies a forested oasis: a 20,000-acre property covered in pine trees, live oaks laden with Spanish moss, and shaggy palmettos. Tucked into the landscape is Moreland Vil-lage at Palmetto Bluff, a picturesque residential community that opened this spring.

“We’ve tried to sit lightly on the land, building enclaves hidden among the trees,” says David O’Donoghue, an executive vice president at real estate firm Crescent Communities, the site’s developer. Much of the property will never be built on at all, with at least 8,000 acres set aside for preservation and managed forest—including a 40-mile network of hiking and equestrian trails. Moreland, which will eventually grow to 500 lots , is the second of only three planned neighborhoods (the first opened in 2004). With an outfitter to supply kayaks and paddleboards, two pools set into the marshland, a nature center, and space for Palmetto Bluff’s archaeologist, the community was designed as a gateway to the outdoors, with a reverence for open spaces built into its ethos.

The architecture is a celebration of the landscape, too. With a focus on the region’s rustic vernacular, Joni Vanderslice of J Banks Design worked with firms Lake Flato and 4240 Architecture to create Moreland’s public spaces. “We imag-ined that old buildings in the area had survived,” she says. “If the fireplace and some of the structure were still here, how would we rebuild around it?” Reclaimed-wood floors, beamed ceilings, and ample porches are hallmarks of the resulting town center, but so are installations by regional artists. “We wanted the materials and textures to feel as though they had evolved,” says Vanderslice. “Some of the design is incredibly contemporary, but it works well alongside the history, the story, and the sense of place we’ve created.” moreland.palmettobluff.com.

Lure of the Low CountryBy preserving more than 8,000 acres of South Carolina’s landscape, a real estate developer creates a luxurious retreat.

THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: The Boundary center holds restaurants, an art studio, a fitness center, and a game room (right). The nature conservancy classroom overlooks a pond. The training pond and an outdoor amphitheater. The bowling alley, with a large relief sculpture made of recycled nuts, bolts, and metal scraps. An aerial view of Palmetto Bluff. OPPOSITE,

FROM TOP: Moreland’s inland waterway. An indoor/outdoor sculpture by Chase Allen.

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QUITE A CHARACTERPecky cypress paneling is coveted for its mottled grain. “It’s full of wild imperfections, so it adds instant texture,” says Amanda Lindroth, who used it to envelop a Bahamas dining room (above). But the wood’s distinctive marks are rare, and its swampy habitat makes it difficult to harvest. Luckily, Lindroth shared her trusted source: floridacypress.com.

Painting the Golden StateThe raw beauty of California has captivated the American imagination since before the Gold Rush, and its rugged coastlines and majestic mountain vistas have long been the focus of landscape painters who took to the open air to record all the drama. The bold brushstrokes of the California Impressionist movement, which reached its peak in the early 1930s, perhaps captured it best, with artists like Percy Gray and Armin C. Hansen rendering the natural resplendence in stunning—and enduringly collectible—glory.

BELOW: Bodega Bay, 1924, by Percy Gray. $27,500; rieserfineart.com.

PUTTING DOWN ROOTSA garden is always a work in progress, with plants often needing decades to grow to their full potential. But who can argue with a head start? A mature tree is a green thumb’s biggest splurge, and prices can top five figures for prime specimens. If your local nursery comes up empty-handed, there are professional tree brokers—with their own secret sources—and landscape designers often have their favorites on speed dial.

RECLAIMED WONDERUtilizing trees felled in urban parks and green spaces, the principals at City Bench breathe new life into lumber that would otherwise be destined to clog landfills. The rescued wood is transformed into one-of-a-kind pieces—tables with their natural edges left raw, mosaic benches cobbled together from different species, side chairs with beautifully grained seats—that are steeped in a sense of place, complete with “birth certificates” citing their origin and the mother trees’ history. Upcycling never looked so good!

Double live-edge wal nut table, $6,300; city-

bench.com.