Stewart completed a five-month sentence at the prison for lying to investigators about a stock trade. Martha Stewart (L) boards a private jet with her daughter Alexis Stewart at Greenbrier Valley Airport Maafter being released from Alderson Federal Prison Camp in Lewisburg, West Virginia. And I felt that she had already covered the really great ideas. They just didn’t sit well in my world of laundry, carpools, and sippy cups. But honestly, after three children, I didn’t have much time for Martha projects. In the kitchen, I did make her royal icing to spread onto sugar cookies, and I think that’s the best recipe if you want to stack cookies because the icing hardens beautifully. Martha was a bit aloof in those days, but I never thought it was more than her stern upbringing and work ethic. And I would grow herbs as she did and in later years take my young daughters with me to Nashville gardens to amass enough volunteer hours to join the local herb society full of lovely ladies just like Martha, except nicer. She told me the right way to force bulbs so I’d have amaryllis in bloom by Christmas and how to save seeds from one summer garden to the next. The food on the table and the recipes that accompanied it were secondary. How she set the scene in this fairytale farmhouse I yearned to call my own.

When I read Martha, though, I studied the photographs. Here on Martha’s farm, 240 apple and pear trees hide a fence around a swimming pool that her daughter said she didn’t need in the first place. And here heirloom roses-those plump David Austin roses in warm peach and blushy pink, roses you’d expect from someone who wrote a book on Weddings -flourish. Their soil has been amended with rich Vermont compost. Martha lives on Cantitoe Farm, in Westchester County horse country, where even the vegetables seem privileged. They wanted to see how the woman who created their favorite cake stand, Egyptian cotton bed sheets, frozen mac and cheese, and now, chardonnay, looks at 80. They wanted to see Martha-the authority on style and author of 95 books about it-in the flesh. I was one of 2,000 at the Antiques & Garden Show in Nashville, and honestly, I don’t think most people in the room came here for the farm. In February I paid $85 to hear Martha Stewart talk about restoring her nearly 160-acre, circa 1776 farm in Bedford, New York. Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images. Martha Stewart decorating cakes on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert February 2.

Martha stewart 1982