• Mint is a bit of a no-brainer. It’s perfect for cocktails, garnishes, or even in floral bouquets, and it grows like crazy, even if you basically ignore it. In fact, it has a tendency to spread and conquer even the most carefully tended of garden beds, so best to grow it in a pot (even better for those of us with limited outdoor space). Certain mints (like peppermint) are hardy even in colder climates, and the plants will need lots of harvesting to keep them in check (more juleps for you!). Grow mint in sun or part shade.

• Chicories like radicchio are an acquired taste—I find them delicious, but their bitterness turns some people off—still, there’s no denying that they make fantastic garnishes. Radicchio’s dramatic red and white coloring looks amazing as the border on a platter of simple canapes or even as the bowl for a few olives or nuts. Radicchio is a cool-weather crop; if you plant in the late summer, you’ll be able to harvest it for holiday parties. Certain varieties are intended for harvest in the warmer seasons, too… just ask for tips at the nursery where you buy your seeds.

• Lemon and lime trees bring lovely fragrance to the garden, and they’ll stock your bar all season long (with lots more to dole out as gifts or to use in centerpieces). If you live in a mild climate, you can grow them outdoors, and even if you don’t, there are dwarf varieties perfect for containers, which can be brought inside during the winter. Just make sure the tree gets a good amount of light and fertilize once a month to keep the plant healthy.

• Dahlias are excellent plants for cutting; they have long stems that can easily be used in arrangements, and they’re prolific bloomers that continue into the fall. The colorful, showy blossoms make a dramatic statement for a centerpiece or to decorate a buffet. They’re tubers, so in milder climates they’ll come back year after year, but in colder spots you’ll likely need to plant them again each spring (easy and fun!).

• I really love certain euphorbias (the type with the unfortunate common name ofMediterranean Spurge) for cutting as well. Their bright green flower heads are sculptural and modern; they make a beautiful statement in a vase just on their own. You’ve got to be careful when handling them… use gloves, because they exude a toxic sap. An opaque vase (rather than glass) is also preferable for this reason.

• Succulent cuttings make fantastic party favors.Echeveria (‘hens and chicks’) come in endless colors and gorgeous forms, and they produce little babies you can just pluck from the garden and plant in tiny pots to send home with your guests. Alternately (to save a little cash) you can use wire and floral tape to turn the succulents into “cut flowers” (check out our tutorial here) and just use a bit of ribbon to turn them into pretty gift bouquets

From Dunhill’s Spring 2011 collection, the iPad case will be available in the near future.

As you would imagine, traveling to stay in an ice hotel will take you to places you wouldn’t otherwise visit. To stay at the Ice Hotel you need to travel to Jukkasjärvi, Sweden — 200 km above the Arctic Circle. The Ice Hotel is the worlds largest ice hotel, complete with warm and cold accommodations, hot tubs and even an Ice Bar — staying in an Ice Hotel most definitely requires a bar!

The Hotel de Grace is in Québec, Canada. They pride their hotel on being just as modern, stylish and contemporary as an average hotel — just in a rather unique way. There’s still fine dining, spa treatments and top of the line accommodations — just on ice!

We’re intrigued by the architecture of these hotels and what a unique experience they would provide. Now we just need to go jump in an ice bath to prepare!

Would you stay in an ice hotel?

Wallpaper is one way to bring a canopy of leaves into your space, but stencils can also be an effective method. A few simple, well-placed painted leaves can add a hint of the natural world, but you don’t want to get too countrified with the look — we recommend staying away from sponge-painted ivy.

Another option is fabric or grasscloth, which adds a whole new textural layer to walls. If you really want to get creative, try something like Phillip Jeffries’ Hand Pressed Leaf Grasscloth, which incorporates real dried leaves into the wall covering. For more information on the options shown above, click through the following links:

It wants a piece of the TV pie.

Even in our Internet world, TV still matters. A recent Citigroup report on the company points out that the average American watches five hours of TV per day. Those are five hours that you’re not using Google to do things like search, check Gmail, or watch YouTube. By getting into TV, Google can capture more minutes of your day, and in turn sell your eyeballs to more advertisers.

But while everyone has been buzzing about Google’s latest TV venture, the medium isn’t fresh ground for the company. In 2007 it launched Google TV Ads, which has yet to evolve into a big piece of the company’s business. Google won’t disclose numbers, but says it’s had over 100 billion impressions since inception.

Doing some back of the envelope math, at about $2 to $5 cost per thousand impressions, Google TV has generated about $200 million to $500 million. But Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) doesn’t walk away with that whole bundle — its cut varies, depending on the deal it has with each inventory partner. (Its annual report noted that revenues realized through Google TV Ads were not material.)

And yet the company has stuck with TV while abandoning its unsuccessful print and radio ad businesses. Analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Partners says his big critique of Google is that it doesn’t have a significant revenue stream besides online advertising. Television could change that, and a closer look at TV Ads can shed some light on why Google cares so much about what we watch when we’re away from the computer screen.

This targeted advertisement made possible by technology

TV Ads is even possible because television isn’t so old media anymore. The technology is there to let Google do what it does best: process data. Through information provided by set-top boxes from its partner Dish Network (DISH, Fortune 500), Google lets TV advertisers target specific channels and shows, and identifies not only how many people saw their ads, but also the demographics of the audience.

The service operates much like Google’s Adwords, where advertisers only get charged when their ads are shown — except instead of bidding on keywords, the bids are for specific shows. It’s another extension of the unique Adwords auction model Google chief economist Hal Varian refined for the firm.

About a third of the users are new to television advertising thanks to this model. But even companies with big advertising budgets like TV Ads’ transparency. Richard D. Hong, vice president of global brand and marketing with MetLife (MET, Fortune 500) says about the status-quo buying system, “We’re forced to make bets on essentially futures for the advertising market.” It seems Google, through its online advertising capabilities, has trained advertisers to demand more accountability for their dollars, a phenomenon that TV Ads feeds.

“We know these people with these interests have watched these programs and changed channels at these times,” says Mike Steib, Google’s director of TV Ads and emerging platforms. “We’ve actually been able to find that we can forecast which ads are going to perform well.”

The biggest issue with TV Ads for a company like MetLife stems from the product’s limited inventory. Hong says the company has maxed out how much it can leverage TV Ads with 10% of its total TV advertising budget. To be fair, Google has continued to grow its partnerships, currently working with more than 95 channels like A&E, MTV, and the Weather Channel. (Its most recent partnership — the Tennis Channel.)

But analysts are concerned that a big network isn’t on board. “You have major forces like the cable industry and broadcasters who are all somewhat wary of letting a player like Google into the business,” says Gartner analyst Andrew Frank.

For now, that’s a point for the little guys: Trevor Fellows, head of ad sales for Bloomberg Multimedia, says that his team can sign on advertisers who might not have thought about Bloomberg TV because they didn’t previously understand the network’s reach.

“The buying processes for advertisers and buying habits haven’t caught up with the way television has become more like the web,” says Steib. Hewing to its stated mission of organizing all the world’s information — yes, even the sitcoms — fixing that disparity is what Google has set its sights on.

Opening on September 25, the day before London’s big annual Decorex Internationaldesign show, the showroom will be Tufenkian’s first flagship location in Europe, following a smaller second location serving several dealers in Hamburg, Germany and stateside outposts in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon.

“London has become a very important market for us with its designers serving clients from all over the world while shopping for product in the local market,” says Tufenkian, the company’s owner and CEO. “And, after our first successful wave of showroom openings in North America in the recent years, we are now positioned to begin our second wave of expansion of Tufenkian showrooms internationally.”

John Erkelens, the company’s sales director, will be running the daily biz at the 1,000-square-foot space, which will house Tufenkian’s core Tibetan and Armenian collections as well as their collaborations with top designers like Barbara Barry, Mark Pollack, Kevin Walz, and Vicente Wolf.

Savvy investors are realizing that China’s growth remains attractive because Beijing is battening the hatches by turning to a new group of consumers: their own citizens. Over the past several weeks, China has taken a number of steps to increase its citizenry’s purchasing power — none arriving with more fanfare than the de-pegging of the yuan.

Despite the prospects of a stronger currency, the People’s Bank of China still mandates that the yuan only fluctuates 0.5% from the daily official rate. As a result, the yuan’s appreciation might not be the silver bullet China is looking for to stimulate domestic consumption. Domestic consumption has actually fallen over time until a small recent rebound, as the chart above shows. As a share of GDP, personal income has had an even more dramatic decline: 53% in 1999 down to just 39.7% in 2009.

That said, there have been a number of positive developments regarding wage growth and government stimulus that will help move China forward towards a more consumption-oriented economy, rather than one that has been fueled by manufacturing and exports in recent years. Here’s an incomplete list:

Wages: In April, Shanghai raised minimum wages 17% to 1,120 yuan per month. Guangdong (China’s largest export base) raised minimum wages in five locales within the province by an average of 21%.

Cash for clunky ovens: On June 3rd, China extended its home appliance trade-in program until 2011. Sales of such appliances have reached 54 billion yuan and 5 billion yuan of subsidies were handed out since the start of the program.

Job growth: On June 8th, a survey indicated that Chinese employers’ hiring plans reached a six-year high.

More jobs: On June 11th, the IMF reported that the surplus of rural workers for labor-intensive work has fallen to about 25 million from roughly 120 million in 2007, which is bullish for wages in that sector (less supply). Conversely, research from China International Capital Corp. that suggests that 31 million Chinese will return to the labor market in 2011 after the completion of projects resulting from the government’s 4 trillion yuan stimulus package. Net-net: supply of labor-intensive workers is still shrinking but perhaps at a slower rate, which is net bullish for wages.

More wages: On July 1st, Bejing increased monthly minimum wages by 20% to 960 yuan. In a similar fashion, Henan (China’s most populous province) raised its minimum wage by 33% to 600 yuan per month.

Rising wages to empower the Chinese consumer

All told, more than 20 provinces and municipalities plan to increase minimum wages this year, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. As a result, we should begin to see evidence of accelerating domestic consumption in the coming months. Furthermore, companies that are positioned to service the Chinese local economy (i.e. domestic retailers and savings deposit institutions) will see an added kick from this wave of wage inflation.

In short, while China built its impressive industries on the back the global economic boom of the past twenty years, it’s now figuring out how to sustain them by turning its citizens into better consumers.

Will higher salaries just mean inflated prices?

Yes and no. The bulk of the wage inflation is coming from the labor-intensive manufacturing sector, where thin margins in certain subsectors of that industry (i.e. textile manufactures) warrant passing through higher costs. In those sub-sectors that can perhaps afford to absorb the hit to margins (auto manufacturers, CPU manufacturers, construction), inflation won’t immediately take hold, if those sectors refrain from passing through price increases to consumers.

The latest CPI reading in China is +3.1% over last year. A likely scenario is that this round of wage inflation is passed through to importers of Chinese goods, with the E.U. and the U.S. being the largest recipients (20% and 17%, respectively YTD through May).In other words, there will be some lag time before Chinese consumers have to worry about inflation hitting their newly fattened wallets.

And keep in mind, China is a save-first economy, so 20-25% wage inflation doesn’t instantly equal 20-25% more consumer spending. Some portion of that will be socked away for a rainy day. Even that may turn out to be a net positive for the Chinese economy: The last 12-18 months have seen a huge growth in loans as the middle class has struggled to keep up with soaring real estate prices. With more money in their pockets to service that debt and recapitalize lenders, China may avoid walking into the credit bubble trap that nearly felled the U.S. economy two years ago.

But embracing a future — whatever that means — isn’t the same as solving a problem. That’s a lesson I learned almost 40 years ago, the first time I realized there was an energy problem in this country. That was during the Arab oil embargo of 1973, which is history to most people but a scary memory to those of us for whom it was current events. We had huge lines at gas stations, a horrible sense of vulnerability, and the same helplessness-and-outrage combo so many people have when it comes to BP. Government price controls, designed to protect people from the higher crude oil prices resulting from the embargo, made a bad problem much worse.

The magic solution? “Energy independence.” Sounded great, would fit on a bumper sticker, made for a terrific slogan. We’d finish the trans-Alaska pipeline, drill for more oil, beef up natural-gas production, step up nuclear generation, apply technological wizardry to use our vast coal reserves to generate clean electricity, liquefy coal to reduce our need for petroleum. We wouldn’t be dependent on foreigners (except for maybe Canada, then as now our biggest outside oil source). It was all going to be great.

Do those things sound familiar? They should, given that stepping up nuclear generation and cleaning up coal are integral parts of plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, though they haven’t gotten the buzz green energy’s gotten.

Alas, the energy independence thing hasn’t exactly worked out. In fact, things have gotten seriously worse. When the Arab embargo hit, we were importing 37% of our oil, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. When the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, sparking another oil crisis, we were importing 43%; currently it’s about 52%.

Flash-forward to the present magic plan. Green energy, which is promoted endlessly by business as well as the government and various pols, is a great idea. It sounds great, and it would be great. But it’s being way oversold and will take years — or decades — to have any major effect.

That’s because green energy is starting from such a low base. Wind power, solar power, and biofuel, the three most-highly touted new technologies, together accounted for less than 3% of U.S. electric generation in 2009, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit group.

So even when we step up production sharply, we have a long way to go before they make a serious impact on the overall electricity situation. “I think it’s going to take 20 years for these technologies to mature, provided that the economic conditions are attractive,” says Revis James, director of the institute’s technology assessment center.

Even if we had windmills on every front lawn, we’d still have an energy problem, because vehicles account for so much of our oil use. And green technologies aren’t without economic or environmental problems. We’ll be outsourcing lots of green-product manufacturing to low-cost places like China, which will help their economies, but not ours.

Then there’s the whole lithium question, which is integral to stepping up battery-run vehicles. Imagine our becoming dependent on countries like Afghanistan — not exactly a model of stability — for an essential mineral.

So now, you ask, since I don’t believe in a magic solution, what should we do? It’s easy, though not politically palatable. You put a heavy tax on electricity, gasoline, and other energy sources whose use you want to discourage. You make that tax refundable — at least quarterly, maybe even monthly — for people who can’t afford it.

Of course, nothing like that is likely to happen. Because “Raise prices, support some energy research, but don’t shove solutions such as compact fluorescent bulbs down consumers’ throats” doesn’t make for a good bumper sticker or sound bite. It’s not magical. It’s just right.