By ANNE MARIE CHAKER

Jamie Marglin ripped out her swimming pool, ordered 30 yards of soil and spent $4,000 on new plantings for her gardens, which span one acre in Ossining, N.Y., on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River.

“The color palette for the entire garden is going to be a symphony of silvers, blues, purples and ivories, with dashes of yellow and splashes of reds,” says Ms. Marglin.

Some of the plantings will be traditional flowering favorites. But most will be plants you can eat. Four weeks ago, Ms. Marglin planted rhubarb, with its lush leaves and burgundy stems, in front of a woodland border of lilacs, irises and hydrangeas.

A big trend in landscaping is adding edible plants as well as vegetables, grapes, daylilies, fruit trees, cabbage and spices to your flower beds or planters. Leslie Yazel has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Mike Belleme for The Wall Street Journal.

“They’re living together,” Ms. Marglin says. “And it’s gorgeous.”

Bucking the notion that vegetable gardens should be banished to an out-of-view corner of the backyard, more gardeners are mixing edible plants throughout the landscape in ways that are inventive, decorative and sometimes stunning. Flower beds are edged with frilly lettuces, tomatoes are climbing up front-door arbors, and strawberries are spilling out of window boxes.

The idea—known in garden-design circles as “edible landscaping”—is to find ways to marry veggies, fruit trees and berry bushes with ornamental plants and flowers in ways that complement both.

At Chanticleer, a public garden in Wayne, Pa., pansies and violas are planted alongside lettuces, mustards and cabbages. This year, a flower bed at the entrance pairs luminescent Brazen Brass mustard with a peach-cupped Katie Heath daffodil, salmon-colored Serenity Rose Magic African daisies and copper-colored wallflowers. The effect, says staff horticulturist Jonathan Wright, is “electric.”

Some home gardeners got into edible landscaping by accident. Geoff Boyer, a financial planner in Allentown, Pa., removed a large holly tree last summer, leaving a gaping hole in the front yard. He couldn’t decide what to plant in the space and, as a temporary measure, put in three bushy tomato plants.

Not only did he like how they looked, but his family actually ate the tomatoes—something they rarely did in the summer heat when the vegetable garden was 100 feet back.

This year, he is planning to go further, threading pumpkin and gourd vines through the front-yard flower beds.

The orange fruit will echo fall-planted mums and complement purple asters, he hopes. He also is considering a clump of corn, to provide a vertical dimension and as a stand-in for grassy ornamentals. “It’s just a different texture,” Mr. Boyer says.

Vegetable gardens weren’t a prized feature of the postwar suburbs, and instead considered a sign of hardship or low status. Nor were vegetable plants—usually arranged in straight rows like food-producing soldiers—valued for aesthetic qualities.

“Why? They’re beautiful plants,” asks Rosalind Creasy, author of the book “Edible Landscaping,” published 30 years ago and released in a new edition in late 2010.

An estimated 30 million households had a vegetable garden in 2011, a 20% increase over five years earlier, according to the nonprofit National Gardening Association, in Burlington, Vt.

Sabrena Schweyer, an Akron, Ohio, landscape designer, says eight new clients have requested edibles in some form in their landscapes. People are becoming “more adventurous in their eating,” she says. “Turnips are becoming hip again.”

Whether it’s unusual heirloom tomatoes, such as Aunt Ruby’s German Green or Yellow Pear, or purple-leaved Black Pearl peppers, which were introduced by the U.S. National Arboretum in 2006, interesting-looking vegetable varieties are more widely available.

“Growers are growing what they think will sell,” says Margie Grace, principal with Grace Design Associates Inc. in Santa Barbara, Calif. “With that amazing assortment, you can really create a composition.”

Edible landscaping probably isn’t the best fit for gardeners looking for a low-maintenance option.

In warm weather, some leafy greens need to be replaced because they “bolt”—flowering, going to seed and acquiring a bitter taste. Tomato plants can start to look ragged by August. Little hands that pick yummy fruit leave blank spots on the canvas.

Susie Dowd Markarian, a Santa Rosa, Calif., landscape designer, says she creates as many as 20 edible landscapes a year.

“I have seen success when people realize what they’re in for,” she says. With less-experienced clients, her advice is to think twice. “Are you going to water, weed and take care of it?” she says.

There are other pitfalls that can thwart a novice and leave well-intended plantings looking sad. Lettuces usually shouldn’t be planted near lavender: Leafy greens like nutrient-rich soil, while lavenders do better in drier conditions.

A hedge of blueberries may require plantings of at least two varieties, for better pollination and fruiting. In order to bear fruit, hardy female kiwi vines typically need a non-fruit-bearing male pollinator nearby.

“Most of those mistakes won’t be fatal,” says Sheila Dunn, a retired microbiologist whose gardens, in Weaverville, N.C., are filled with lavenders, herbs and more than 50 fruit- and berry-bearing trees, bushes and vines.

Two years ago, she began experimenting with unusual fruit trees and bushes, planting them along three terrace levels in front of her house. She selected plants bearing fruits that are either expensive to buy or hard to find in stores.

The Asian persimmon trees sounded so exotic, she was surprised they would grow at her home. But not only is the fruit delicious and sweet, “it’s the most carefree fruit tree you can imagine,” she says.

Two of the persimmon trees are planted at the top terrace, along with a hardy kiwi vine dangling from the deck above. Beneath the kiwi, she planted four lavender bushes, which do double duty: The silvery-blue foliage contrasts with the dark foliage of the kiwi, and it camouflages the vine’s bare stem.

Separately, an arbor anchored on the top terrace offers two seasons of interest: A purple wisteria blooms in spring, and a Concord grapevine provides armfuls of dark-blue fruit in the summer.

Not only are edible and nonedible combinations visually appealing, but Ms. Dunn believes fruits and veggies are less pest-prone than they would be if they were planted on their own.

Many insects that are beneficial to plants, such as ladybugs, flock to flowers—and will eat the pests that would otherwise destroy the vegetables.

“It makes it much easier to garden organically when things are not in perfect little rows,” she says.

In recent weeks Ms. Dunn has planted two Chinese Jujube trees on tricky cliffs flanking each side of the driveway, which in a few years will produce exotic date-like fruits.

“The fun of it is that as you meander through the property you can reach out and eat,” she says. “It’s a tactile experience.”

Write to Anne Marie Chaker at anne-marie.chaker@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 25, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Who Put Lettuce in My Daffodils?.

A few eyebrows were raised last month when disgruntled Liverpool cinemagoers to the Oscar-nominated “The Artist” demanded their money back, saying they weren’t told it was a silent film. While their actions are a little strong, as a wine writer, I can empathize. When was the last time you bought a bottle of wine only for it to taste nothing like you thought it was going to? Only the other day, a collector of Burgundy’s wine was lamenting to me how he can spend as much as €20 on a bottle and still get it “very wrong.”

Wine labels are often extremely confusing. Yes, they can be graceful, charming and, in some cases, works of art, but when compared to the labeling of other foodstuffs, they are rarely credited as informative. Of course, there are exceptions. The widespread practice in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Chile, New Zealand and the U.S. of placing the name of the grape variety and tasting notes on the back label has helped the consumer enormously. But sometimes, I wonder whether anybody outside of the rarefied circles of the wine world really understands what the descriptors on the back label actually mean.

Drinking Now

From everyday drinking to a treat from the cellar, three wines ripe for
tasting today
.

It is a question wine professional Robert Joseph, of U.K. wine-research company DoILikeIt?, has been investigating. In surveys he has conducted, consumers rarely come up with fruit descriptors to describe wine, he says. This is revealing, as that is the common language used by wine professionals (myself included). So where a wine critic might describe a white wine as possessing notes of apple, lemon or orange peel, according to Mr. Joseph’s research, consumers prefer words like dry, smooth, fruity, mellow, rich, crisp, fresh, full-bodied and zesty. Similarly with red wine: spicy, intense, smooth and oaky are preferred to red cherry, balsamic, cedar and black currant.

In a separate survey conducted by DoILikeIt?, around 3,000 British supermarket consumers were given a set of descriptors and asked: “Which words do you associate with wine you like?” The results show that 20% to 25% liked oaky white wine, while 40% didn’t. Again, these are revealing, as in European wine circles, the overuse of ageing wine in new oak barrels is often derided by critics. Admittedly, 40% is a large number, but it is not by any stretch a majority.

Which brings us to Australian Chardonnay. In the mid 1980s, Australia took the export markets by storm when they produced easy-to-drink, fruit-driven Chardonnay, with a distinctive, creamy oakiness. “Sunshine in a bottle,” was what some critics called it, and it worked. It was a huge success and, in many ways, Australian Chardonnay became a brand within its own right.

Back then, Australian wine producers told us that the concepts of terroir and different regional styles didn’t matter, as it was the grape variety that was the main driver of flavor. But in recent years, there has been a revolution in Australian winemaking that has seen a change in the style of Chardonnay produced. It is, says Adam Eggins, chief winemaker at Clare Valley wine producer Wakefield, a style that is heading toward less wood.

Wine producers in Australia have started to produce Chardonnays that have a crisp, lean style—in some cases with no oak at all. Moreover, when you talk to Australian wine producers, you now regularly hear words such as regionality and cool climate.

But, as Mr. Joseph asks, who is dictating the style change? He questions whether the new Australian Chardonnays have a sufficient point of difference to make him want to buy them over, say, a Macon-Villages. Moreover, if he were offered an unoaked Australian Chardonnay in a restaurant, why would he choose that against a similar style of wine from a European region such as an Albariño from Spain or a Grüner Veltliner from Austria. Are there any conclusions we can draw from these findings?

Of course, any survey is just a snapshot. But it is interesting to note that when I asked Mr. Eggins which of his Chardonnays sold best, he immediately pointed to the oily rich Chardonnay, which, you’ve guessed it, was aged in oak.

Write to Will Lyons at william.lyons@wsj.com

By HEIDI WALESON

Chicago

As Handel operas have worked their way into the modern repertoire, incorporating more singers, players and conductors with baroque experience, musical standards have risen. However, many stage directors still don’t trust the material. Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Rinaldo” (1711), which opened last week, had a top cast, including the countertenor David Daniels in the title role, and the splendid Harry Bicket in the pit, but its musical glories—it is packed with hit tunes—were at odds with director Francisco Negrin’s shallow production concept.

Based on Torquato Tasso’s “Gerusalemme liberata,” “Rinaldo” pits the forces of light against dark. Goffredo’s Crusader army is besieging Jerusalem; the sorceress Armida, in league (and in love) with the Saracen leader Argante, abducts Goffredo’s daughter Almirena to lure and thus neutralize Almirena’s lover Rinaldo, the Crusaders’ principal knight. Designer Louis Désiré created a tall, curving plexiglass wall to represent the walls of Jerusalem, plus a pull-out sculpture, with piled-up letters spelling out the city’s name in Italian, as a combination gate and jungle gym.

Indeed, the directing resembled playground games and jittery comic-book action. There was much agitated dashing about by the singers and a corps of dancers, who leaped around as Armida’s furies and other unidentified creatures. (Ana Yepes did the choreography.) Bruno Poet’s lighting design kept the stage shadowy, with occasional lurid spotlights.

Armida is the opera’s pivotal figure, and a more complex one than the staging allowed. Her ruse works, but she falls in love with Rinaldo and cannot make him love her. Incensed at both Rinaldo and Argante, who falls for Almirena, she pours out her rage in “Vo’ far guerra,” accompanied by an elaborate harpsichord part, complete with cascading cadenzas. The set’s other principal element was thus a giant harpsichord case, suspended from the flies. It was a trap for Almirena, who spent Act II inside it; one of the dancers and then Armida pounded away on its keyboard during the aria, and smoke curled out of it for a grand finale. In keeping with this visual joke, neither Armida’s pain nor her fury was taken seriously. And if the villains are jokes, so are the heroes and the lovers.

Too bad, because the singing was good. Mr. Daniels was affecting as he mourned his abducted sweetheart in “Cara sposa,” and thrilling in the martial “Or la tromba,” snapping out vivid ornaments in duet with the accompanying trumpet. Julia Kleiter was a sweet-voiced Almirena, her lament “Lascia ch’io pianga” a heart-stopping moment, even from inside the “harpsichord.” Elza van den Heever brought an imposing, steely sound to Armida and looked formidable in a bright-red plastic dress. (Mr. Désiré’s costumes suggested superheroes and villains; the Saracens, however, appeared to be wearing pieces of Persian carpet.)

In the trouser role of Goffredo, Sonia Prina displayed great chesty low notes and machine-gun coloratura. She was slightly ahead of the orchestra in her first arias, but soon found her rhythm. As the problem-solving Crusader Eustazio, the fine countertenor Iestyn Davies displayed a focused and flexible lyric sound. Luca Pisaroni was a splendid Argante, conveying arrogance and amorous uncertainty. Jory Vinikour, the spectacular harpsichordist, needed no visual gags to shine, and Mr. Bicket drew a sprightly, stylish performance from Lyric Opera’s orchestra; the wind players with aria-accompanying solo duties were right on target.

***

By contrast, Francesca Zambello’s production of “Show Boat” was almost too respectful. This 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II is a period piece, the first American musical to tackle such serious themes as racism and miscegenation, to say nothing of having a black chorus and a white chorus performing together, while still incorporating the frothy trivialities (dancing girls! jolly choruses!) that had defined the genre up until that point. Based on Edna Ferber’s novel about a Mississippi show boat, the episodic story spans 40 years, with brief plot bits dropped in among big production numbers.

With cheerful sets by Peter J. Davison, brightly colored costumes by Paul Tazewell, and the ferocious energy of the chorus set pieces (Michele Lynch did the accomplished choreography for 12 terrific dancers), the brightly scrubbed show worked hard to entertain. The cast of opera singers and music-theater performers, subtly amplified to carry in the Lyric’s large theater, oversold the dialogue sections. Ericka Mac and Bernie Yvon, as the comedy team Ellie and Frank, were particularly over the top.

And the stylistic seams showed. The score’s iconic songs—”Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Bill” and, of course, “Ol’ Man River”—anchor the darker plot scenes, which seem unrelated to the general jollity of the rest of the show. The first two got knockout, nuanced performances from soprano Alyson Cambridge as the tragic Julie, a mixed-race actress who succumbs to alcoholism and precipitously disappears from the narrative; bass Morris Robinson, as Joe, brought a fierce and pungent gravity to the last, a somber anthem of inevitability. However, the ill-fated romance between the boat captain’s innocent daughter, Magnolia (Ashley Brown, a sweet-voiced music-theater singer), and the gambler Gaylord Ravenal (baritone Nathan Gunn) didn’t catch fire. Mr. Gunn seemed ill at ease with the role’s high tessitura, and his acting was muted. And much of the rest of the music doesn’t come up to the level of those famous numbers.

Angela Renée Simpson was a rich-voiced Queenie, the “Cotton Blossom” cook; Ross Lehman did a stellar comic turn as Captain Andy Hawks (he hilariously acts out a complete melodrama when the show is interrupted by a gun-wielding audience member); Cindy Gold was properly sour as his wife, Parthy. John DeMain led a bright, brassy orchestra, using the original Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations, complete with banjo and guitar. All the elements were in place, but the production exposed the creakiness of “Show Boat” rather than welding it into something moving.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 6, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Hard Sell.

By ERIC FELTEN

Christchurch, New Zealand, where an earthquake last year killed 185 people, is still struggling with how to treat another of its casualties, the city’s Anglican cathedral. Built of stone in the 19th century, the church has been damaged repeatedly by earthquakes over the years, and repeatedly repaired. But with its spire and sections of ceiling and walls collapsed, Christchurch’s Anglican bishop has declared the old pile too expensive to rebuild. Instead it will be “deconstructed” (which isn’t a postmodern linguistic gesture; it’s just that the bishop doesn’t like the awful word “demolished”).

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Christchurch Cathedral in November 1995

Many locals and preservationists are hoping to stop the wrecking crew, trying to buy time to raise the money and do the structural engineering that might save the Gothic beauty. They rightly ask, what’s the rush?

Especially since, meanwhile, the diocese has decided to toss up a temporary church designed by Japanese “emergency architect” Shigeru Ban. The architect has made a specialty out of temporary structures, using large, coated-cardboard tubes and stackable shipping containers. The roof for the Christchurch sanctuary is to be made of Mr. Ban’s signature tubes, which instantly earned the proposed building a nickname: The Cardboard Cathedral.

Some of the eye-rolling comes from the very idea of putting up a temporary church—shouldn’t sacred buildings strive to express a commitment for the ages, a confidence in the durability of faith? Yes, but even stone crumbles. A temporary church makes a virtue out of expressing the impermanence of this world.

Still, the plans for the temporary cathedral are a shame because they are one of the architect’s least interesting designs. After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, Mr. Ban drew up a paper church that, with it’s elliptical footprint, was a lovely modern interpretation of the oval churches built by Bernini in the 17th century. By contrast, his Christchurch design is the sort of plain A-frame used promiscuously in the 1960s and ’70s, a tall shed that could work just as well as a church building or a Polynesian restaurant. Christchurch will soon have a sort of ecclesiastical Trader Vic’s.

But if the temporary chapel isn’t Mr. Ban’s best work, it does have this going for it—it isn’t permanent.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Devastated in March 2011 after the recent earthquake

Most architecture is built to last, which is one reason it occasions such bitter fights. Take the controversy over new additions to the small church of Notre Dame du Haut in rural Ronchamp, France, built in the 1950s by the modernist Le Corbusier. When Renzo Piano was hired to add a visitors center and convent to the grounds, prominent international architects mounted an unsuccessful petition against the additions, denouncing the changes an artistic apostasy that “opens avenues to all forms of barbarity.”

How much less fuss there would have been if the new buildings had been temporary. One reason the planning of new structures is so fraught is that we have to live with the potential mistakes for decades to come.

There’s a great history of temporary architecture, the showcases for which have often been world’s fairs, where grand pavilions are built to convey the passions and fashions of the moment. The “White City” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago allowed American architects to present their vision for ideal public spaces. Not that everyone was happy with the experiment: Chicago architect Louis Sullivan rejected the Neoclassicism that dominated, and contributed a building rich with color and ornamentation. He is said to have griped that the rest of the White City set back American architecture by decades.

Forty years later architects were at it again in Chicago. This time, at 1933′s Century of Progress International Exposition, the buildings were a futuristic fantasy of the modern and moderne, with the prefab disposability of the buildings part of the architectural statement. They would be as influential, in their way, as the White City had been a generation before.

If Gustave Eiffel’s iron tower had been proposed as a permanent structure, it probably would never have been built. But as a temporary novelty for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, why not? When it came time to take it down, Paris officials somewhat grudgingly allowed that it had become a part of the city: If the Eiffel Tower “did not exist, one would probably not contemplate building it there, or even perhaps anywhere else,” concluded a city commission in 1906. “But it does exist.” And so it continued to stand.

Perhaps we should encourage more temporary architecture, works that can be experimental because they don’t have to endure (or be endured). Wild new styles could be tried with the confidence that unless they succeed, the buildings will be disassembled, proving as ephemeral as the bad ideas behind them. And if any of these life-size architectural models do capture the public imagination, they can always be set, as it were, in stone.

Please suggest a book for my great-niece’s birthday. She is going to start studying at culinary school and likes to read.

—R.P.J., Boston

I was about to argue that long, loving discussions of food in novels was a modern phenomenon (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “foodie” was first used in 1980), but I came to my senses when I saw this passage in H.G. Wells’s 1910 comic novel “The History of Mr. Polly.” It’s after lunch, and Mr. Polly has indigestion.

His midday meal: “cold pork from Sunday and some nice cold potatoes, and Rashdall’s Mixed Pickles, of which he was inordinately fond. He had eaten three gherkins, two onions, a small cauliflower head and several capers…and then there had been cold suet pudding to follow, with treacle, and then a nice bit of cheese…. He had also had three big slices of greyish baker’s bread, and had drunk the best part of a jugful of beer.” Mr. Polly may not have been a foodie by today’s standards, but he most definitely cared what he ate.

In “Aspects of the Novel,” E.M. Forster argued that the purpose of food in fiction is merely to draw people together for meals—characters “hunger for each other, as we do in life, but our equally constant longing for breakfast and lunch does not get reflected”). This is a rare occasion when I must disagree with Mr. Forster. Novelists have played with food since the beginning of novels. Robinson Crusoe roasted turtle eggs and goat; Gulliver was fed loaves of bread the size of bullets; Tom Jones ate fried buttock and carrot. Food grounds fictional characters in geography, class, age, physicality, aestheticism.

From “Ulysses”: “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” Charles Dickens wrote this redolent description of the Cratchits’ Christmas pudding: It smelled “like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that!”

Anyone who loves food and cooking would appreciate Penguin Classics’ Great Food series, 20 beautifully produced short volumes of food writing from the past four centuries. In “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig & Other Essays,” Charles Lamb (1775-1834) imagines the man who comes home to find there had been a fire in his cottage, in which he had left some pigs. He feels a pig to see if there’s any life in it, burns his fingers, puts his fingers to his mouth and—crackling!

In Samuel Pepys’s “The Joys of Excess,” the diarist wrote, “my wife had got ready a very fine dinner: viz. a dish of marrow-bones. A leg of mutton. A loin of veal. A dish of fowl, three pullets, and two dozen of larks, all in a dish. A great tart. A neat’s tongue. A dish of anchovies. A dish of prawns, and cheese.” Other volumes in the series include essays by Alexander Dumas, Elizabeth David and Alice Waters.

If the great-niece has a sense of humor, she might enjoy Calvin Trillin’s “The Tummy Trilogy,” whose advice on cooking corn on the cob I still remember years after reading it: “He always waits until dinner is precisely three and a half minutes away before snapping a few cobs off the stalks in his back yard and passing them to his son, who is faster at short distances, to shuck as he proceeds at a dead run to the pot of boiling water waiting on the stove.”

Another funny food book is James Hamilton-Paterson’s “Cooking With Fernet Branca,” which includes recipes for mashups like Mussels in Chocolate. John Lanchester’s novel “A Debt to Pleasure” is more wicked than funny; it is deadly serious about the correct preparation of a species of wild mushrooms with a mild, nutty flavor but whose common name is the death cap. Jim Crace’s novel “The Devil’s Larder” is another paean to food and its human obsessives. Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” tells the semi-fictional story of a cookbook writer watching her marriage circle the drain.

In his report on the lives of unemployed workers in northern England in the 1930s, “The Road to Wigan Pier,” George Orwell wrote that the most important aspect of his subjects’ lives was their food. “What is a human being after all but primarily a bag for putting food into,” he wrote. “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.”

—Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at booklover@wsj.com.

By SOPHIA HOLLANDER

Brooklyn College

Blueprints for Ebbets Field that were thought lost, including the one above, will be the centerpiece of an exhibit on the Brooklyn Dodgers at Brooklyn College starting on Thursday.

They were presumed lost, one more casualty from a move that broke a borough’s heart.

But this week, a century-long odyssey will come to an end when the original 1912 blueprints for Ebbets Field, the iconic home of the beloved, bedeviling Brooklyn Dodgers, will be displayed in public for the first time in decades.

They will be the centerpiece of an exhibit on the Dodgers at Brooklyn College set to open on Thursday. Three of the 18 plans will be on display, alongside team photographs, cartoons and one of the last home plates used at Ebbets Field—one with a memorable dedication to the owner who moved the team to Los Angeles after the 1957 season: “May Walter O’Mally [sic] roast in hell.”

 

Dodgers’ Stadium Blueprints Discovered in Basement

3:22

Ebbets Field, the home of the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, the borough’s former baseball team, was demolished in the 1960′s. Original Ebbets Field blueprints – presumed to be lost for decades – will be displayed to the public for the first time later this month.

The Dodgers played for 45 seasons in Ebbets Field, where baseball’s first televised game took place, in 1939, and Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play a Major League game, in 1947. The field was torn down in 1960 and replaced by a public-housing project, but its cozy design remains an enduring standard for elegance and intimacy that modern architects have emulated.

“You might say that these blueprints are one of the holy grails of baseball memorabilia,” said Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn’s official historian and a rabid Dodgers fan.

On a recent afternoon, the blueprints were laid out on tables in Brooklyn College’s conservation lab, the only center for restoring damaged historical items in the City University of New York system.

The prints measure up to five feet long and 20 inches wide. Although the faded blue paper is torn at the edges, with pieces of Scotch tape scarring the back, the intricate white ink designs vividly evoke the lost stadium.

Baseballs are woven throughout the plans, embedded in ironwork along the side of the facade, through terra-cotta balls adorning the top of the stadium, in stitches visible in the tile inlay on the rotunda floor and in its dangling baseball-and-bat chandelier.

The recovery of the blueprints is itself a tangled, quirky tale befitting the team that for many still defines Brooklyn.

They were actually found in 1992 after a dedicated search by Rod Kennedy, a Manhattan writer who has often examined the subject of Brooklyn. They sat in his closet for 20 years after he retrieved them from a musty room filled with cobwebs in a subbasement of a city Department of Buildings archive.

Mr. Kennedy made it his mission to find the blueprints in the early 1990s after he stepped out of a subway near the Ebbets Field site at Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place in Crown Heights and was astonished to see that there was no plaque marking the location of the iconic stadium.

Hoping to spark discussion about building an Ebbets Field replica, Mr. Kennedy began looking for the blueprints, but without success. Historical societies, colleges and the city’s Fire Department and Department of Buildings—none was any help.

“They said this is like finding the plans for the pyramids. They don’t exist,” said Mr. Kennedy, who had found more than a dozen plans for other fields for his business creating tiny tin replicas of baseball stadiums.

“It became a quest to find the Ebbets Field plans,” he said.

Perhaps the mystery was appropriate: The creation of Ebbets Field was also veiled in secrecy.

In 1908, then-owner Charles Ebbets—a former ticket seller for the team—started secretly purchasing land for a new stadium to replace the team’s wooden structure near Washington Park. It was to be designed by architect Clarence Van Buskirk, with the intent of creating the most magnificent, state-of-the-art park in baseball.

Ebbets focused on a former pig farm in a neighborhood known then as Crow Hill that had remained undeveloped despite grand plans for a botanical garden and museum nearby. To hide his intentions, he created a shell company with the name, Pylon, plucked at random out of the dictionary, said Bob McGee, author of “The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

“His great fear,” said Mr. McGee, was that “if word got out the price would skyrocket, and it would be beyond what he could afford.”

The company, under the direction of the team attorney, hired real-estate agents to fan out across the area to secure land. None was told the real purpose behind the purchases.

Such was the genesis of a Brooklyn icon. It was built in less than a year at a cost of $750,000.

Historians are hailing the discovery of Van Buskirk’s 1912 blueprints in part because the initial design can be glimpsed only in photographic fragments. The stadium was renovated and expanded in the 1930s.

“The original blueprints are important because that’s probably the best evidence we have of what Charles Ebbets’ vision was for his ballpark,” said historian John Zinn, who consulted on a recent Dodgers exhibit at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Their discovery, he said, “is a big deal.”

Mr. Kennedy discovered the prints after he and Marty Adler, founder of the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame, convinced the city Department of Buildings to allow them into an archival subbasement. Mr. Adler couldn’t make the first trip, Mr. Kennedy remembered, so he descended into the bowels of the building alone and found himself facing a dim vault.

“Bela Lugosi could have lived there as Dracula,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It was that ominous looking.”

Once inside, he stared in dismay at rows of metal shelves, stacked with thousands of documents, all cloaked in layers of dirt and dust. Then he got his first break: Mr. Kennedy found Ebbets Field blueprints in the first batch of documents.

Blackened fingerprints still smudge the envelope that contained the plans. But the prints inside were remarkably intact.

Mr. Kennedy convinced the buildings department to let him remove the prints, he said, with the promise to find them a suitable home.

But nothing is easy when it comes to the Bums, the borough’s mostly affectionate nickname for its team. No place Mr. Kennedy turned would take the plans and promise to exhibit them.

“Some of them felt nervous because they didn’t know how to quite preserve them because they’re old and delicate,” he said. “Others, they were just going to archive them.”

He wanted them available to the public eventually, so they sat in his closet as he waited.

The Mets’ plan to model Citi Field after Ebbets Field jump-started Mr. Kennedy’s plans. He offered Mets officials the prints, and there was an initial plan to display them in the entrance rotunda, Mr. Kennedy said.

But the team ultimately decided against it, he said. A spokesman for the Mets declined to comment.

In January, Mr. Kennedy passed the blueprints to Mr. Schweiger, the Brooklyn historian, who accepted instantly. He was already planning to give a speech on the Dodgers at his alma mater, Brooklyn College, in April.

When he unrolled the plans for acting college archivist Marianne LaBatto, “it was like he was opening up the blueprints to the lost temple of Jerusalem,” Ms. LaBatto said. “I could see that he handled these blueprints with a sense of reverence.”

She quickly came to share his appreciation.

“They were like works of art,” she said. “They also document something in Brooklyn’s history that’s now lost and that’s what we try to do at the archives.”

After decades of searching, Mr. Kennedy said he was relieved to have found the right home.

“They needed to be in a place of importance because these things belong to the people of Brooklyn,” he said. “It was such a great loss when the Dodgers left. At least they have a little piece of something back.”

Corrections & Amplifications:

Rod Kennedy discovered the original blueprints of Ebbets Field by himself. An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Marty Adler accompanied Mr. Kennedy. An earlier version of this article also misspelled Slava Polishchuk’s surname in a photo caption.

Write to Sophia Hollander at sophia.hollander@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 16, 2012, on page A17 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Soon on Display in Brooklyn: ‘Holy Grails’ of Baseball.

The British restaurant world was slightly taken aback when it was announced in February that Skye Gyngell, the founding chef of Petersham Nurseries Café, had resigned and was being replaced by fellow Australian Greg Malouf, the leading exponent of Middle Eastern cuisine in the Antipodes. MoMo, his recently closed restaurant in Melbourne, was renowned for its creative mélange of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine.

Petersham Nurseries Café (petershamnurseries.com), in a ramshackle jumble of hot houses next to untrammeled pastureland surrounding the Thames at Richmond in southwest London, must qualify as one of the most romantic dining destinations in the U.K. It isn’t just the eclectic decor—tables from Indonesia, Indian prints and exotic plants—but the atmosphere itself that seems to have been imported directly from the Tangier period of Matisse. This magical destination was the consequence of the style and taste of both the Boglione family, who live in neighboring Petersham House, and Ms. Gyngell, who had cooked for them privately before launching the restaurant in 2004. Her cuisine was seasonal, ingredients-based Mediterranean dishes that appealed to the affluent residents of this exclusive London suburb, especially at weekends, when the 90-seat restaurant was fully booked for weeks in advance.

Although no reason has been given for her abrupt departure, Ms. Gyngell told an Australian journalist just before she resigned that gaining a Michelin star last year had been “a curse” because the new throng of customers complained that the décor wasn’t up to their expectations of what such a highly ranked restaurant should be. There were no linen tablecloths and the walls were prone to allowing the occasional draft to intrude on windy days. Whatever the truth of this, it became a new reason for commentators who dislike the alleged rigidity of the Michelin inspectors to blame them for her demise. People didn’t pause to think that there was a certain injustice in blaming Michelin, which was celebrating the obvious quality of this idiosyncratic establishment, rather than the narrow-mindedness of any new customers. Admittedly, others wondered what was there to stop the restaurant’s receptionists from merely alerting potential guests to its rustic rather than refined charms. Ms. Gyngell, who has said that she will eventually start another restaurant, declined to comment on the reason for her departure.

Regardless of what occurred, Greg Malouf has a formidable task ahead to assure the existing client base that his sensibilities stretch to embrace their notion of what dishes should be served in such a unique environment. Does the particular charm of the place translate from the central Mediterranean to further east?

Mr. Malouf, 53 years old, is no stranger to Petersham Nurseries, having cooked master classes there in the past when launching his acclaimed cooking-cum-travel books on Middle Eastern cuisine, which he co-authored with his former wife, Lucy Malouf.

The Melbourne-born chef, whose family originally came from Zahlé in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, has also trained in France and Italy. He says his cuisine “is obviously Mediterranean with Middle Eastern techniques and flavors, along with a lot of childhood memories and the places I have traveled in recent years.”

Since starting his new role in London, there has been a slight toning down of his spice and chili notes for the North African-influenced dishes, but he has always incorporated aspects of dishes from Iran, Syria, Turkey and even Greece.

Although he has only been in the kitchen since Easter, the results are impressive, starting with a range of raw vegetables accompanied by an intensely smoky baba ganoush, the existing Petersham brand of extra virgin olive oil and pita bread. The experience only gets better with his signature spiced rabbit and chorizo with parsnip and skordalia (a Greek garlic and potato dip), all covered with grumolo verde chicory. The best dish of all was a large duck bistayeea, a delicious pastry-covered pie with layers of duck and Moroccan spices, which was partially inspired by a dish Ms. Gyngell served using pigeons. These, and his other dishes like braised fennel with Turkish chili and walnut crumbs, or an exquisite slow-cooked lamb shoulder, were executed with considerable skill and rigor.

Mr. Malouf, who is on his third heart (his first transplant was in 1989 and what he hopes was his last in 2003), says more changes at Petersham are likely; he is working with existing kitchen staff and wants to hire people who are at least as good or better than he is to get through the transition. Despite the risk of upsetting regular clients, he is determined not to rely on existing signature dishes, but to explore what can be done once he has familiarized himself with the local produce.

“This is a wonderful place to work and, in terms of how I work with produce and ingredients, it is very similar to the ethos here,” he says. “When you are in a new environment, it is not a good time to experiment. I want to keep the culture intact but slowly evolve it.”

Write to Bruce Palling at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

By DEVLIN BARRETT

Roger Clemens heads back to federal court in Washington Monday to face perjury charges, a trial with much at stake for both the pitching great and for the public’s perception of steroid abuse in baseball.

WSJ’s Devlin Barrett checks in on Mean Street to discuss baseball pitcher Roger Clemens’ day in court in a retrial of perjury charges. Photo: Getty Images.

Mr. Clemens, one of the best pitchers in baseball history, faces criminal charges stemming from allegations he lied under oath to members of Congress in 2008. He said he hadn’t used steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs, contradicting allegations by his former trainer. Mr. Clemens has steadfastly denied the charges.

His first trial last summer collapsed in less than a week when prosecutors showed jurors a video of lawmakers discussing evidence the judge, Reggie Walton, had declared inadmissible. The judge considered tossing out the charges altogether, but he eventually decided the government could retry Mr. Clemens.

Elizabeth Greathouse, a juror at the first trial, seemed to lean toward the defense team after opening arguments. “I felt like the prosecutors were just browbeating us over the fact that Congress did a report [about steroids], this guy didn’t agree with it, comes in and tells his side of the story, but because Congress doesn’t agree with him, they’re going to prosecute him,” said Ms. Greathouse, a lawyer who now runs a yoga studio in the nation’s capital.

Prosecutors say they have witnesses to demonstrate that Mr. Clemens lied to Congress, and they say his alleged perjury undermined Congress’s ability to make policy on steroid abuse.

In 2007, Mr. Clemens’s last year in the majors, the Mitchell Report to Major League Baseball identified dozens of past and current ballplayers who had allegedly used performance-enhancing drugs. The investigation, which was led by former Sen. George Mitchell, named Mr. Clemens as one of those players.

He angrily denied the allegations, and he insisted on testifying before Congress to clear his name. “Let me be clear. I have never taken steroids” or human growth hormone, Mr. Clemens testified in 2008.

Federal investigators concluded Mr. Clemens had lied and that former trainer Brian McNamee had told the truth. Mr. Clemens was charged with perjury, obstruction of Congress and making false statements. If convicted, he faces about a year and a half in prison, according to sentencing guidelines. Jury selection is to begin Monday.

Mr. McNamee, a witness against Mr. Clemens, has said he secretly kept syringes and bloody cotton balls that he had used to inject the star. Mr. McNamee said he kept the material hidden inside an old beer can, and he later turned that over to investigators. Another likely witness for the prosecution is Andy Pettitte, a former New York Yankees teammate and a friend of Mr. Clemens’s. Mr. Pettitte told investigators that Mr. Clemens once admitted to him having taken human growth hormone. Mr. Clemens has said Mr. Pettitte “misremembered” the conversation.

Kenneth Wainstein, a former U.S. attorney in Washington who is now a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, said the first trial ended so quickly he didn’t expect it would cast a shadow over the second. “I don’t believe either side has a significant tactical advantage one way or the other by the fact the case was mistried previously,” he said.

Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 16, 2012, on page A3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Clemens Up at Bat In Perjury Retrial.