Substack is my newsstand

Hello dear readers,

The dog days of summer always remind me of those lazy days as a teenager listening to AM radio and reading magazines while I worked on my tan — trust me, I’ve got the wrinkles to show for my errant ways. My love of monthly magazines followed me into adulthood shifting from fashion to home and to gardening as my priorities changed. For a while I even edited a small independent quarterly magazine called Pacific Horticulture. But as inspiration and information moved to internet, print magazines faltered.

These days, Substack is my newsstand. While I’ve (ahem) left fashion behind, my feed connects me with artists, poets, and writers as well as inspiring home ideas, delicious food and brilliant gardeners including Jo Thompson, a UK garden designer who writes about gardens and color at The Gardening Mind.

I loved magazines and had great stacks of them, some dating back years. Periodically (see what I did there?) in a fit of reducing clutter, I would tear pages out, organize them by topic and file them away. I still have those files, along with the memories of projects, gardens, and meals, inspired by those articles.

Thankfully I no longer have to make room for stacks of magazines but my impulse to hold onto stories is as strong as ever. I think this is what’s motivating me to sift and sort through the Cultivating Color archives while also adding more personal pieces I’ve written over the years.

This week I’ve put together a list of published stories for your summer reading pleasure in the hope that something might inspire you whether that’s in the kitchen, the garden, or the garage. Or not. After all, these are the lazy days of summer.

Thank you for adding Cultivating Color to your personal newsstand. I’m so glad you’re here.

xo Lorene

We now return to our regular garden programming

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July 25, 2025

Hello, Open garden season is officially over. At least that’s true in the case of my small plot. Ordinarily, my life as a gardener is a private endeavor; that’s part of the beauty of living on a dead end off another dead end.

Summer time/beach time. Everything in my online store is on SALE. This includes prints, postcards, original color studies, books, and more — that’s what everything means! Click the button below to browse (there’s that word again) the collection. Enter the code SUMMER at checkout to get 20% off your entire purchase.

browse the collection

Don’t forget the code: enter SUMMER at checkout to get 20% off your entire purchase

read chapters so far

This summer I’m serializing my book, a handmade garden with weekly chapters posted right here on Cultivating Color. So far I’ve published: Introduction. Chapter 1 — The Ground Floor. Chapter 2 — Control Issues. Chapter 3 — Feature Attractions

I’d love to know what you think