How to Take Charge of Your Garden: Foundation Hedges

 At first glance, below, 'in love'.  Those hedges !  The dining room.  The furniture.  The Color choices: historic, Green-Brown-White.

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Imagine, in your mind's eye, removing the hedges, below.  What do you see?  You see a mess.  Next, keep the hedges, and remove all the perennials planted behind them.  What do you see?  You see a tidy, more open version: neater.

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You start gardening with your own  stamp and heroics, a decided idea of what will be new & best.  Best ever.  A season passes, and you see every effort, every dollar, your divine master piece, is all a sham.  Worse, it's the most heroic sham ever.  Did you out perform me in this arena?  I adore you.

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Worse, you go back to those 'ridiculous' Garden Design Rules, realizing they aren't there to constrict you.  They liberate you.  Interesting.  What you thought shackles, you learn is freedom.

  

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Keeping the hedges, above, remove the perennials, and add a few cone shaped evergreens and pleached trees.  Pleached trees and shaped evergreens, below.

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Pic, above, here.

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Having perennials for decades, then dispensing with them, planting flowering shrubs, having them for decades, now they're mostly being dispensed with too.  Didn't see this coming.   Why the newest change?

Deer proofing, and ease-of-care, Aging in Place.  Importantly, choose for pollinators in each incarnation.  You realize, this is not a 'less than' choice.  It's the richest choice you can make.

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I'm stripping my garden to its barest form, yet not reducing its benefit to pollinators, property value, reducing HVAC costs, nor the love my heart partakes, having found the universal-in-the-particular.

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 Pic, above, here. 

Simplicity, above, pure stage craft.  The stage is yours.  Pieces sited to leverage your life in joy & beauty.

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Reading, early morning, recently, came across this, "It has been said that once a woman reaches a certain age, life provides only two consolations -- gardening or God."  Ambra Edwards.  

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Blessedly, didn't have to wait to reach a 'certain age'.  Gardening and God have given decades of joy, challenge, vocation/avocation, epiphanies, friends, a life in full.

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"I gardened all the time: it was physically, emotionally and intellectually satisfying -- all of it." Penelope Hobhouse.

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Garden & Be Well,  XO  Tara

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How did I ever dislike hedges !  True.

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Yes, used bottom 2 pics before.  They're that good in simplicity, the garden design can be inserted myriad places.  

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Hedges, 2+ centuries ago were not purely for aesthetics.  Hedges had to pay their rent, keeping chickens out of the potager plantings.   Best to get rid of your mentally 'ideal' hedge plants, unless they are size appropriate & native (or provide like a native) & deer proof & to your zone.  

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Without the hedge, top pic, the Garden Design falls apart, worse, in winter, it's a ravaged off season view.  This is Part I: Hedges Around the House