Keeping Plain, Plain

There is no 'architecture' at my home.  I've created my own.  The humble cottage.

Instead of lipstick-on-a-pig with the front door.  I've left it as modest as the day it was built.

With only a hint of character.
.
Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
.
Pics taken last week in my garden.  Before the garden I can remember disliking my home so much I would cry coming back from any vacation.  This is my starter home, here 5 years then off to something 'better'.  That was almost 3 decades ago.  If away for a night I cannot wait to get back and see what has transpired in the garden.

Using Words in the Garden

Be wary of words in a garden.  

Welcome?  Don't have it in a 'word', say it with your front door, paint color, light fixture, door mat, plants, & etc.
.
Let 'words' in your garden be subsidiary focal points, amplified in the song of your garden.
.
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
.
Pic taken near my front door last week.  A Christine Sibley piece.  Of course bought long before she died.  The ivy 'Gold Heart' is not aggressive.

Perhaps the Right Choice is....

What do you need to get rid of?  When Susanne Hudson came to choose colors for my interior she also moved furniture.  Then, literally, she picked up and threw out my sisal rug.  This was at least a decade overdue.

.

1-2 times each month I do the same thing with clients.

.

Mostly it's pots or their entire patio 'set'.  

.

Today, look around your garden, what are you not seeing anymore?  

.

If I came to your garden what would I throw out?

.

Garden & Be Well,       XO Tara

.

Pic, lost provenance.

Choose a Theme then Overdose

 Choose a theme, Overdose on your Theme.

.

Orchard House, (aka my starter home in a working class neighborhood of cluster homes ca. 1986, today.)

Feng shui has it right about gardens, better than any garden class, 'you must be able to flow easily around your property.'  Like Mrs. Wilcox I adore walking round my garden.  E. M. Forster knew women.  Coop, below,  is mostly rescued materials.  Why not boxwood, roses, itea, hydrangea, camellia, daphne?  The coop is worthy.

View across the drive, below, with front loading garage.  Some jurisdictions have outlawed my type of home.  Too unfriendly.  Garagecentric.  No worries, it is my starter home, here 5 years & off to something more worthy of my magnificence.

It's obvious I had to do more growing than the garden.

I'm particularly pleased with this bit at the side of my garage, above.  Though the white roses lost their graft and only the root stock is left.  Reminds me of an old vicarage wall .
.
Did you see the neighbor's houses?  Why would you?  You've entered my world.  An old cottage......  and become lost in my theme.
.
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
.
Pics taken in my garden last week.

How to Use Heads in Design

Got heads?

They're for

exterior, and

interior.
.
Have you noticed a formula for your favorite interiors & exteriors?  Not into formulas?  No worries, formulas are nothing more than Shopping Lists!  Now, I have your attention.
.
I've always been drawn to interiors with heads & ......
.
In my garden is a decades old collection of broken heads.  Most were a $1.
.
Top pic from same home/garden as previous post.  Bottom pics Nicky Haslam, via Cote de Texas article.
.
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
.
More than heads, bodies too.  And urns with plinths.

Front Porch: Chain Rail

Lunch, below, this week.  Every home seen from the chair I sat in was a century old and white clapboard.  

Front porch columns each have iron rings, below, for chains lost to history, I've already designed their replacement.

With their 'swag' to mach the arch, below.

Will copy a pair of the columns, deeper into the garden, as entry to a garden room with enfilade from the front sidewalk.
.
Repetition.
.
Notice the power lines, bottom pics?  The bane of my existence for a mature camellia I wish to keep and limb-up into a tree.  They will contact the power company to see what can be done.
.
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
.
Pics same garden as yesterday's post.

Let Simplicity Serve Your Needs

There isn't a lot here yet the magic is intense.

Narrative.  Simplicity.  Choices.
.
"What plant should I put here?", I'm asked often.  It's not the right question, in return I ask, "How do you want to live?"
.
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
.
Pic The Vintaquarian.  Remember this trinity: Narrative.  Simplicity.  Choices.  What is your garden, today, answering?

Choosing Color for a Fence & Fixing a View

May Day, yesterday, at one of my jobsites, below.

White fence?  Not happening.  Made the space smaller & became a focal point.  Detracting from the focal point of the home.

Now, above/below, a blend-into-the-background Benjamin Moore Alexandria Beige.

See the stop sign, roads, & home across the street?  Of course you do.  Ouch.
.
Soon evergreens in a tapestry hedge, with fruit trees, will create a garden with grounds and no offensive views.
.
Can it get better?  Yes, using existing evergreen shrubs needing to be moved anyway.
.
Garden & Be Well,         XO Tara
.
Pics sent from client.  Lucky children, my last May Day pole was in the 60's.

Choose the Right Doormat

Doormats with writing?  No.  Front door, home & garden are the trinity saying, 'Welcome'.

This doormat, above, recently sold for over half a million pounds.

.

"

Footnotes

• Property of a Lady
  
  Provenance: 
  The temple stone was removed from 'Brackenhill', an early 20th Century Tudor Revival house in Crowborough, East Sussex. From 1935, Brackenhill was the home of William Murdoch Thyne (1878-1949), a Scottish civil engineer working in Ceylon between 1915 and 1937, and later in Jamaica. Thyne was responsible for the design and execution of many large reservoir projects including the raising of the Labugama Dam in Sri Lanka and the filtration works for Colombo. He was a Vice-President of the Ceylon Engineering Association and is recorded as having used elephants for the lifting of heavy masonry at Labugama. Thyne and his wife, Lilian, returned to Brackenhill in 1937 prior to departure for Jamaica where he was appointed chief engineer and member of the water commission at Kingston. During the Thynes absence from home in 1938-39 it would appear Brackenhill was let to Oscar Mackrill, a solicitor, and his family. Mr. Thyne continued living at Brackenhill after his wife's death in 1949 and died in Crowborough in 1952, whence the house and temple stone passed into the possession of the current vendor's family.

More about this sale, here, from Bonhams.com .
.
Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
.
Pic via Bonhams.  Major take away?  When the finder of the doormat died, his home was sold, doormat included.  It was the new owners who won the doormat lottery.  One of the best garden stories I've read in years.   For all  Lucia fanatics a new chapter must be written.

Skyscaping & Landscaping

Italian cypress & Chinese snowball skyscape, below.

                                       Dwarf Indian hawthorn, below, at the base of the Italian cypress.

You must skyscape & landscape.

.

Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

.

Pics in my garden this week.  My sweet, tiny, makes-me-happy, garden.   

A Lawn Rule: Before & After

Came for the art show, a first visit, earlier this month.  He, we hadn't met before, asked a few garden questions.  Within moments, "Your lawn is in charge & you must be in charge of your lawn", I said.

I described a typical Victorian shape, for their Victorian home, rectangular with the corners worn away leaving an oval of turf.  Corners filled in with stone.

Earlier this week he sends me these pics, above/below.

I know, without asking, more pics will arrive.
.
Loving what he's done and can't wait for the 'corners' to be filled.
.
And I'm sure he remembers my comment about a focal point on axis with the front window, at right, above.
.
Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
.
Top pic mine.  Is your lawn in charge?  

Side Porch

The kitchen has a door to the side porch. 

Kitchen door, above.
.
Garden & Be Well,       XO Tara
.
Amazing how few homes have a side door & porch.  Same home as previous post.  Painting by Christine Shockley.

Front Porch Questions

Every element sings together on this front porch.

Field gathered furniture swathed in the came color.

Porch questions.  Is the porch so wonderful I must go inside and see the home?  Is the porch so wonderful I must see the garden?
.
Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
.
Pics taken last weekend, same garden as previous post.

Front Porch

Subtle, original.

 A desk on the front porch.

I must know you from the exterior of your home, before ever knocking on the door.
.
Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
.
Pics from same home/garden as yesterday's post.

Glass Awning

Never in USA, but there must be some, only in Europe

have I seen glass awnings over a door.
.
Garden & Be Well,             XO Tara
.
Pic Slim Paley.  The glass awning I saw, in France, is a slide somewhere in the bowels of my archives.

Driveway Design

A driveway.

Sound of gravel.
.
Tapestry hedge.
.
Oh my this is good.
.
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
.
Pic Whimble.

Front Porch Simplicity

When the competition is an old Pecan Orchard I know to go simple, below.

Soon the tea olive, above, will engulf the end of the porch.  And then be pruned into a tunnel, for the pure life necessity of leaving the porch at its tiniest entry.  Silent Partner doesn't think this is needed.  He has his reasons, I have mine.  200 acres and I am particularly interested in this square foot.

My competition, above.  Fields, Pecan Orchard & Home, a perfect trinity.
.
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
.
Pics taken this month at jobsite of several recent posts.  Leaving the Pecan Orchard alone includes creating Tara Turf, siting daffodils, boxwood & historic brick path, keeping fence at the road and saying 'no' to foundation plantings.
.
Another fabulous Landscape Design making me unemployable to the largest landscape design/build/maintain companies across USA.  Planned obsolescence of irrigation, keeping fence, no foundation shrubs, no zoysia, no annuals.
.
MATH on what 'those' companies would lose in installation & a single decade of maintenance with my design.  New fence, irrigation system & rows-upon-rows-upon-rows of green meatball shrubs. Lawn: 2 acres sod, mowing, irrigation, pre-emergents, fertilizer, edging.  Shrubs: several prunings yearly, mulch in the beds, pre-emergents, fertilizing, replanting annuals 2/year.
.
Minimum annuals charge is $500/season by the best firm (of course I use the best, Simply Flowers, & of course they are needed in many commercial, and residential situations.)  Monthly maintenance $500.  Fence $4000, irrigation $4000, mulch 350/year, chemicals/fertilizer 200/year, &  foundation shrubs $5000, 2 acres zoysia sod $52,800.
.
$141,300.00 for a decade of traditional USA Landscape Design.  My Landscape Design, above, $50/month maintenance fee, no foundation plantings, no irrigation, no chemicals, no mulch, little pruning, no sod, little mowing, keep fence, no fertilizer, no annuals, $6,000 for a decade.  (A kind woman, I give away the concrete foundation expense of the brick path, mine are in dirt.  Otherwise add another $5000)
.
$135,300.00 difference. 
.
Has the math sunk in?  
.
My work/style is not meant to save money, yet it does.  It's historic Italian.  Enfilade from the interior of the home, pollinator habitat, a thanks to Providence, a joy to look at and live within.  When away on vacation my gardens are carried in the heart with a yearning to know everything while gone & return soon.  If you can leave at all.
.
Chill Pill Urban Ag!  There are other ways in this industry to make money.  Ask Silent Partner !  Thank you for letting me be on your Outreach team.

Poverty Cycle Into the Music Room

The library across the hall, previous post, is moody with northeastern light.  The music room, below, hums in southeastern light.

Eastern light, below, in the mirror, southern light, window above.

The garden view, below, is one of my proudest achievements.

I took the garden, a century old, to its Southern roots in time & place.  Using the Poverty Cycle.  Looking in the window, below, seen, above.

Tara Turf to the foundation, granite curbstone step instead of green-meatball-foundation-plantings, drifts of daffodils as-if-they-were-always-there.
.
Plenty of areas to play & show off in this garden, and I have, but without using the Poverty Cycle the garden would lack soul, character, integrity, & have too-much-uneducated-ego.  Of course you've deduced, this is my ego, above.  This is a portion of the front porch, hence, double ego!
.
Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
.
Pics taken last week at jobsite.  Same garden as previous several posts.
.
Ego for doing-the-right-thing makes me unemployable to the largest design/install companies across USA.  Why?  It's all about sales.  Are you beginning to understand the prevalence of green meatballs & foundation plantings and, and, and?
.
Oh my, a little Puppet Barbuda this morning.  Uneducated ego?  Testosterone-on-wheels-mow-blow-go-commodify-all-I-touch-get in fast-get out fast-sign my contract-pay me every month.  Sad, you'll pay later in lower house value, higher HVAC, increase maintenance expenses, poison  ground water with fertilizer, destroy pollinator habitat, and worse, harm your spirit with ugliness.  

Rustic Simplicity

Simplicity is a choice.  

Rustic simplicity is a bold choice few Americans take.
.
Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
.
pics My French Country Home.

A Brick Trinity

  I have never liked the bricks on my house.  Red, that orange red.  Truly red bricks must be fired longer, and cost more.

4 sides brick, and backdrop focal point to every garden view.  When is the last time you looked at your home whilst walking the garden?
.
Must find the correct 'white' to brush the bricks.
.
Aside from 'aging' the bricks, the whitewash adds 'depth' & 'texture'.
.
Sold, I adore trinities (and epiphanies): age, depth, texture.
.
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
.
pic Better Homes & Gardens.
.
If you want a garden that is a moat of grace around your home & life, contact me.
.
Details about online design services.
.
Learn action steps to creating your best garden & home when you hire me to speak to your group.
.
Details about lecture titles here.
.
I've written several garden books available on Amazon.