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I often see women who look very groovy and chic and edgy, and I imagine them living in a minimalist, art-filled home, but then I get there, and it’s a cabbage rose English country cottage look.

Adorned with dried Queen Anne’s lace, red clover flowers, bolted callaloo, dried onion flowers, fresh thyme and a fresh cabbage rose on top, the cake that baker Aimee France made for a recent wedding at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park looked as if it could have been decorated with flora she found while transporting it to the location.

Among Solnit’s less expected forays is a chapter on the allure of Ralph Lauren’s Anglophilic chintz cabbage rose fabrics of the 1980s, which “beckoned from a never-never land of an idealized past, the past of the pastoral and paradise.”

For something more vibrant, unexpected and whimsical, there’s Josef Frank’s designs for Svenskt Tenn. Or to embrace a more classic aesthetic, there’s Colefax and Fowler’s Bowood, Rose Cumming’s Cabbage Rose and Lee Jofa’s Althea, among others.

And in the very same way the Spirit long ago became manifest in the Body of Christ, the first cabbage rose began to materialize on my tablecloth.