What it actually means...

Ben Owen III is the third generation of his family at the wheel in Seagrove, North Carolina. He fires in a four-chambered wood kiln he built himself and glazes in the Chinese Blue his grandfather developed in the 1930s. His vases stand in the Ritz-Carlton Tokyo and The Umstead, and his work is held by the Smithsonian and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Corey Alston sews sweetgrass baskets by hand in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, in the Gullah Geechee tradition he learned from his wife's family. The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds his work, and the Mint Museum calls him "the leading sweetgrass basket maker of his generation." Garden & Gun covered his Guinness-record basket this summer.

Sandy Whitaker works from Cartersville, Georgia, pressing hydrangea, dogwood and orchid blooms and mounting each original on archival paper. Designer James Farmer has featured her pressings in two of his books, Arriving Home and Home Again. Erin Napier used them in a cottage kitchen on HGTV's Home Town.

Kass O'Brien makes her ceramics in West Palm Beach, shaping them after anemones, kelp, barnacles, and ginkgo leaves she collects on long-distance runs. Interior designer Celerie Kemble was among the first to champion her work, and her works have appeared recently in Veranda and Galerie Magazine.

Tommy Mitchell cuts wafer-thin brass, copper and steel into flowers in his North Carolina studio and paints each one by hand in the French tole floral sculpture tradition. Interior designer Bunny Williams collects his work, and Flower Magazine has followed it from his first flowers to his sculpture.