Having a home and garden on Martha’s Vineyard is for dreamers. Some of us dream big, some of us have smaller expectations, but it’s in the nature of this place to appreciate and beautify your surroundings. Whether you’ve owned for years or are in an earlier stage, there’s an ongoing process of shaping a vision for where you live, visit, and vacation. Sometimes an idea will come to you – a new accent color for a bedroom or cutting a wider swath to plant more veggies – and making that fantasy a reality has a certain reward.

Many of the homes and gardens we visit in this issue are the results of dreamers. Jeffrey and Kristen Kusama-Hinte took the old Humphreys homestead on State Road in West Tisbury down to its bones and built it up again. With such a public location for all to track the progress, it’s exciting to see inside now (page 24). Since David Geiger’s house isn’t on the water, he made his own pond, brook, and water garden in the woods of Chilmark (page 58). Builder Billy Meegan has a distinctive style of constructing guest houses that are small in size but large in impact (page 46). Of course, you don’t have to own a home to have dreams, as witnessed by Perry Garfinkel, who writes about the plus side of moving among rentals – a.k.a. the Vineyard shuffle (page 44).

Plenty of other articles in this issue will inspire the visionary in you, as we dig into fifteen fantastic perennials to plant (page 34) and chew over the idea of creating tasty salads using grilled vegetables (page 66).

If your ideal Vineyard home and garden still elude you, it’s time to start bringing those dreams to fruition – even if you simply choose one project to do this year.