Holiday greetings from Antiques and Winterthur.(Winterthur Museum and Country Estate's holiday design)

A Christmas tree hung with finials, cartouches, phoenixes, and pineapples--an antiquarian's yuletide delight? That was the initial idea for the December 1958 cover of The Magazine Antiques, but, as the editor in chief Alice Winchester perspicaciously observed, "one cannot dictate to creative genius." In the hands of Milton H. Glover, for a quarter of a century--between 1948 and 1973 -- the magazine's designer and then art director, the idea "evolved," first into a "stained-glass window" and then into something in between--the cover illustrated here, a creation that Winchester described as ultimately representing the "Tree of Life, that spreading, ascending, flowering tree which is said to have its roots in Paradise" and which was sent as a "holiday greeting to all readers of Antiques."

An equally festive and creative treat of a holiday tree awaits visitors to the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate in Delaware. An avid gardener and horticulturist as well as the legendary early collector of American antiques, Henry Francis du Pont saw his property as a whole, filling the house with early woodwork and decorative arts and enhancing the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape with inspired plantings of choice trees and flowers that still provide a glorious display from January to November--in fact through the entire year if you count the holly and viburnum berries and the graceful branches of pinetum, heavy with cones, and sometimes snow in December.

During his lifetime, Ruth Lord, du Pont's daughter, recol lected in Henry F. du Pont and Winterthur: A Daughter's Portrait, there were always flowers in the house: "forsythia ...