Same Garden Design: Different Each Time

"I don't like the idea of happiness --- it is too momentary --- I would say that I was always busy and interested in something --- interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness."  Georgia O'Keefe
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Garden Design technique, below, is the same in each garden.  Whether you adore Natural, Formal, Farm, Modern, Eclectic, Etc. each is accommodated. Centuries of Gardens proving its worth.
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An axis leading to a focal point, scaled to walking, seasons, budget, maintenance, and grace.


Pic, above, here.
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What day will you visit the garden, above/below, what day will you see it shot, above/below?


Pic, above, here.


Pic, above, here.
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Going to this garden, I would rather see it off season, above/below.  Far more to learn about how it is gardened & designed.  Pics are nice; physically being in the space better.
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Pic, above, here.
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Formal allee, above, and the same Garden Design technique, as a Wilderness, below.
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Pic, above, here.
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Another version of the same Garden Design, below.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Garden Design, below, is same Garden Design as, above, and above that....
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Pic, above, here.
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Across centuries, it works.  Here's the joy; your property, your home, your soil, your sun/shade, your heart.  Take joy.  It's grace for your life.  And Earth.

 
Pic, above, here.
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At the front end of my professional Garden Design career, this garden, below, was 'nice', now this garden thrills.  Layers of Nature.  Histories of peoples, continents, eras copying this same Garden Design, below.  Knowing 'the why' of how the Garden Design, below, works adds to its joys.  And, a template protecting Earth from human interference, anthropocene, we're living through.
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Using trees, shrubs, groundcovers for your zone, micro-climate, once established, you won't need irrigation, and certainly no fertilizers or chemicals ever.
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What's in the Garden Design, below, making it so special?  Canopy and understory trees, shrubs, meadow.  Nature's potent pollinator habitat.  Given to all.  Freely.
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Choosing mostly natives, or non-native non-invasives, this Garden Design, below, will live centuries.  Regenerative.  Picking non-natives can starve local flora/fauna.  A loving heads-up to the 'why' of using Natives.  Using Natives was passed to me, with love, and its how I choose to pass it to you.  Not one of us perfect.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Time passes, articles read from other scientific disciplines, removed from the world of Garden Design, about soil.  Years of articles about soil, biomes, fungi, pollution, trees, air, water, carbon, oil, industrialization.
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"Many of us have been wonderstruck at the discovery of mindedness within the Earth and between trees, sensitive, ephoratory, and communicative below our gardens,..... over 5 kilometers deep, 27,000 fathoms down, there exists a rich ecosystem, 2 times the size of all the world's oceans, teaming with micro organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of all humans....some organisms can live thousands of years.
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1 inch of topsoil equals a thousand years.
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If humility were imagined as a visible thing, it would be soil: quiet, brown, soft, maintaining networks underground and feeding the whole of the living world." Jay Griffiths, Dwelling on Earth.
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Trees communicate myriad bits of information with electricity through the soil.  Thousands of miles not unusual.
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Tesla came to fame, discovering electricity free from the soil.
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The same electricity in the soil, powers our heart & brain.
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“Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind.

"Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed -- incidentally, deliberately -- imagination and memory go with them. 

W.H. Auden knew this. 'A culture,' he wrote warningly in 1953, 'is no better than its woods.' ”

― Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Across the decades I've had many client homes, Atlanta, GA, bricked with Chicago Brick. seeing an article seemingly about them was too much to pass by, instead, learning about soil, ice ages, politics, racism.
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From that article,  To and From The Common Brick: Slow-Motion Disaster On Chicago's South Side,  

    "Between 1780-1980 USA lost 60 acres of wetlands every hour for the entire 200 year span."
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No stewardship in that sentence, pure politics.  Soil, animals, water, fungi, weather, plants, what else is affected in our loss of wetlands?  What does the loss of wetlands cause to happen to soils underneath what is lost, weather, temperatures.
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Husbandry is in tatters.  Rarely is 'husbandry' used, quaint, outdated as a word, and lifestyle choice.  From Webster's Third New International dictionary: " Husbandry 2a: the judicious use of resources: CONSERVATION, THRIFT (borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry --- Shakespeare.  b: the control or use of resources: MANAGEMENT (problems of soil conservation and husbandry of water resources --- "  Caps are Webster's.
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Pic, above, here.
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This Garden Design, above, is husbandry, if plants chosen are native, or neo-native and friendly to local flora/fauna/soil.  Also stewardship to Nature, yourself,  and property values.  Siting trees properly, you will save money on HVAC bills.
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Stewardship.  Gardening always gains by the newest members from the work world, retiring.  Teaching Master Gardeners for decades, students at the local college, and home owners classes at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, I get to meet pure gardening fiends, pent up from decades of professional life, now retired.  Hoping now for retiring lawyers.  People to help rewrite Home Owner Association rules, myriad layers, including landscaping.  Instead of mow-blow-go landscaping encouraging mono-culture lawns, irrigation, fertilizer, mulch, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, decades of mulch application, and etc.  A turn to Landscape Husbandry, Landscape Stewardship.
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Homeowner Associations, decades old, have a great purpose, over time keeping it great must include a review.  Changes, with the same mission statement, must include husbandry and stewardship.
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"We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom.  And separating one from the other...knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about."  Toni Morrison.
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I was late to the honor of stewardship.  It came with the birthday gift of 8 heirloom chickens, 8 years ago.  Five chickens massacred, the neighbor's dog, don't ask.  Three chickens remain, still teaching lessons.  My chickens notice Covid, their leftovers have been threadbare.
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"The epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out."  Walter Benjamin.
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"Wisdom in the age of information."  Maria Popova.
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Since 2018 when mom comfortably & slowly declined and died, the sense of life blowing apart and coming back together again continues to repeat.  When will that stop?  Was it always true?  Why did I just notice in 2018?
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Having information, about my own life, family, past to present, blew up into merely facts.  The information changed, not the facts.  Some facts obscured, received sunshine.
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Funny that.  My turn to learn this.
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Realized long ago, we all get the same lessons in life, but at different times with different teachers.
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Do I take the lessons?  What do I do with it, if I do?  That makes up our lives.
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Answers are in the garden, gardening, propagating, designing, precious, this beat, given me, a resource.  Things will continue to blow up, come back together, and in the garden, I'll make sense of it, or not, while taking joy in the gardening.  Learning something new.
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This template has been solid in the time of Covid.
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Garden & Be Well, XOT