After 42 years in love, 33 of them at their ravishing 27-acre North Hill Garden in Vermont, and a lifetime total of two quarrels, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd were working on their fourth book together, when Wayne died of a heart attack at 68 in 2010. Alone, Joe didn't step foot in the garden, skipped every meal, collapsed, and ended up in the hospital for a week. Little by little, he returned to life and eventually finished To Eat: A Country Life
[Kindle]. Each of the 35 short chapters begins with an enchanting line drawing by Bobbi Angell depicting the food under discussion: apples, chard, potatoes, winter herbs, wild salads, Egyptian onions, etc. and continues with just the right blend of historical, personal, and cultivating details. Four chapters describe their farm animals, including a herd bull who was the son of the queen's herd bull at Balmoral and a pig named Rolo who died of bleeding ulcers from loneliness. About half the chapters end with a recipe or two, some from Beatrice Tosti di Valminuta of Il Bagatto in the East Village. Many more recipes can be found in Eck and Winterrowd's excellent Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill. 
Even better, with more detail about their lives and their flowers, are their two longer books Our Life in Gardens
[Kindle
] and A Year at North Hill : Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden. Earlier, alone, Eck wrote Elements of Garden Design.
Horst patriotically joined the U.S. army as a photographer in July 1943, three months before he became a U.S. citizen. (He was German, born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann but chose to be Horst P. Horst because he was known by his first name and to distance himself from the Nazi officer Martin Bormann.) By then he had been famous for eleven years, thanks initially to lesbian Janet Flanner's New Yorker review of his Paris show in 1932, and he had already shot Dietrich, Davis, Crawford, Coward, Schiaparelli, Chanel, and Garbo, as well as his most famous photograph, The Mainbocher Corset. He had already had an affair with his mentor George Hoyningen-Huene, who took this photo of Horst age twenty-five in 1931 and had dated future-filmmaker Luchino Visconti; and he was five years into his relationship with former British diplomat Valentine Lawford, with whom he would stay for sixty-one years. Together, they adopted and raised a son, Richard J. Horst. Out of favor and largely ignored in the 70s, Horst made a comeback starting in 1980 when Life hired him to shoot nine photos. In 1990, David Fincher used Horst's signature light-and-deep-shadow style to create Madonna's video Vogue, even reenacting his Mainbocher Corset shot. Horst continued to work until close to his death at ninety-three in 1999.
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