Design is in 2 Directions: Double Axis

Walking further into the back garden from the house, below, 

At the back of the garden, below, waking toward the house.

Same focal point, double axis.
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Gardens MUST be gorgeous in both directions.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics taken last week in the garden of Paul/Lisa Brown.  It will be on the Atlanta Botanical Garden Connoisseurs tour Mother's Day weekend, May 10-11, 2014.
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Design: How to Decorate a Big Blank Wall

Copy, is a rule of Garden Design I did not agree with for years.

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Now?  How could I have been so ridiculous?

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Facts.  If it's pretty in another garden it will be pretty in yours AND unique.

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That crazy 'terminally unique' illness.  We all have it & life is blessed once that disease is eradicated.

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A lot of houses have the grand blank wall, somewhere.

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Place 3 pair of closed door shutters, with mirrored transoms, add door knobs, hang lanterns, plant a vine, put in a few tons of #89 granite gravel, add furnishings.

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Done.

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Unique.

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Would love this at a flower show.  5 entries, each given the same size wall, copy the inspiration, above.

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Would love to see this in Italian rustic, French provincial, desert southwest.

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Whatever !

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Easy.

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COPY

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pic taken yesterday in a local garden.

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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Bunny Williams Potager: Complex, Pretty & Easy Life Support

Have seen potagers, below, for decades.  Across Europe & USA.  

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Potager: flowers, vegetables, herbs, clipped edging.

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Recent epiphany about what a potager is.

Mixing flowers & herbs with vegetables increases yields up to 80%.  How?  Increasing pollinator habitat.

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Clipped hedging keeps chickens out.  Chickens destroy vegetables/herbs/flowers, but eat harmful bugs. 

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Plus, you get chicken shit.

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Instead of a merely sweet, pretty, easy, garden design style, the potager was

a life support system throughout much of history.  Terrible history, with subsistence living, wars, plagues, no anti-biotics.
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How did anyone, aka me, not know this about a potager?  My grandmother knew these things.  My mother falls within the scope of Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique.  The generation of women leaving farms/agrarian knowledge behind to live a modern life raising children, tending house with a maid's help, and no work outside the home.  Oh, the drudgery of it all and yes I'm one of those grown children crying throughout, The Help, every time I watch it.
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" Friedan says that this change in education arrested girls in their emotional development at a young age, because they never had to face the painful identity crisis and subsequent maturation that comes from dealing with many adult challenges.^[9]"
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Sinful forgetting, a client named this loss of agrarian knowledge.
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Recently, because I now have chickens, mom has told stories about Grandma's chickens.  Grandma was an RN & head nurse at her hospital in Augusta, GA.  throughout those years she kept chickens and incubated many.  Mom was an only child and said how she hated the time her mother spent with the chickens.  From the stories I know Grandma raised significantly more chickens than her family needed or could feed easily with food scraps.  Why?  Grandma was giving away eggs and laying hens to every woman she met who needed a helping hand.   
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pic Bunny Williams
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Design: Intentions more Powerful than Money

Where you put your attentions you will create your life.

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Yesterday, below, in my bower.

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With no money in a blue-collar working class neighborhood squarely within the prototypical demographics of today's suburbia near a major USA city.

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AKA my starter home, 3 decades later, with the alcoholic spouse during those decades gone.

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Where I put my attentions I created my life.

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Beautiful garden, beautiful life.  A thought, now my truth.

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Gratitude for that long marriage.  Forced into creating a life that was dream, until the plodding-plodding-plodding made it real.

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No regrets about any of my choices. 

Flowers falling on flowers yesterday, below.  Foetid & exhilarating.

My brain is repulsed by the foetidness of these composting flowers, yet the DNA thrives on its highest plain in the foetidness of my garden.  Life itself.
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Bower- Mirriam-Webster:     1:  an attractive dwelling or retreat

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:  a lady's private apartment in a medieval hall or castle

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:  a shelter (as in a garden) made with tree boughs or vines twined together

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Odd, but the foetidness of yesterday's flowers made me want to take off my clothes and roll-baby-roll !  Laughing & shouting of course.

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Now, tell me about street/prescription happy drugs?  Poor unfortunate souls needing those.  

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Penelope Bianchi: Quote

Studying historic gardens across France I learned about field-gathered furniture.

Need patio/terrace furniture?  And the budget is tite?  Dumpster diving on garbage pic-up days, garage sales, thrift stores, junk shops.
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Paint it all the same color.
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Done.
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Queen of interiors & gardens, Penelope Bianchi says, "I am a huge believer in what "looks great" IS GREAT!"
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pic from Penelope Bianchi.  
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Design: Copy the Templates

Design isn't all magic, it's science too.

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Choose 30 front yards or 30 living rooms.

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Each will have a thread & template.

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Copy the threads & templates.

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I always ask clients for pictures of gardens they like, and must see their interiors.

At Yellow Belle, my satellite office/guest cottage the budget is zero to thrift store, or inherited.

Ironically, I've been forced to Yellow Belle with internet issues at my main office.

Living room template with a table behind the sofa + pair of lamps, has been oddly productive.  Laptop slid in without having to move anything.  Boom, working.

The dozens of pics I've saved for living rooms have a high number of screens amongst them.
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Never considered wanting or buying a screen, but there they are in myriad pics.
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Trusting the process, copying templates, this screen, above, was at my nearest thrift store.
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When I design gardens the humor never fails when a client says, "Oh, I like that .........."  Of course they do, it's in their pics.  I knew to copy their template.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics at Yellow Belle this week.  If you noticed the lamps, then I must tell you dozens were brought to my thrift store.  Ritz-Carlton Atlanta was remodeling and a contractor threw them on the street as garbage at his home.  His neighbor brought them in.  I bought 4.
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Design Style: Arcadian Idyll

Hanging in her hallway, below.  

Her artwork is varied with a strong thread of serenity amongst every piece.
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In her painting I see clearly the design style for a tiny lake with island on their property.
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Arcadian Idyll.
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Thomas Cole's, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1834, above.
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A pastoral rustic poem of utopian life.  Harmony with Nature.
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Does her beloved quite understand where she's heading?  No, but he's trusting her thru the process, to results.
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My beloved puts pin to balloon, announcing more than once, 'you can't live in a perfect little garden world'.  Knowing the words have no value to my reality.  Centuries worth of other people too.
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Amazing how visceral, attraction or repulsion, a rustic garden affects people.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Top pic taken at jobsite last week.
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

.

Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Design: Making Clients Cry

After a soiree we discuss how guests have experienced her garden of acreage from arrival/departure.

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How the sexes, ages, income levels interact with the garden.

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Some cross the threshold of the garden, others look say a few words, some say/see nothing. 

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What branch of psychology is this?

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Me?  I must know how people experience my gardens, not just how my clients perceive their garden.

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Stay with me, it's going somewhere. 

Tears.  What makes someone cry in a garden?  Unbidden.  How does a garden guest arrive with their cocoon-of-life yet leave knowing their decades long construct is rendered too little?  In fact, gone.
  

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I've had crying guests in my garden for decades.  At my garden lectures across the country, crying attendees, for decades, too.

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Have been in my friend Susanne Hudson's garden when someone burst into tears.

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Stories follow all the tears.  Words, incoherent, powerful.  And understood.

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So.  At the garden, above, we were talking about her last soiree.  A guest, a man, financially successful, no longer young, in tears.  

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He awakened to how a garden is woven into DNA, and home.  One of the few who could verbalize, during epiphany, 'I will have this.'
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics taken at jobsite last week.
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

.

Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Words: Use with Caution in Styling

With some people, years ago, I learned not to share joyous news.  They took delight in diminishing my joy.  Another epiphany, not too long after, 'I choose the plants in my garden, choose the people in my life.'  Within seconds eject button pushed on several persons.

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Lightening life's load was instant.  No regrets decades later.  

Words in the garden, be wary of using them.  Words, most often, dominate any mood, any narrative, weather, ephemeral delicate beauties, etc.
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Gardens speak, without words.  It is the human cheapening their language.
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Instead of admonishing with a picture proving my 'words' I've chosen an exception.  Words in a garden providing pleasure.  If my garden needs a sign, 'Spring has Sprung', do not ever, in a lifetime galaxy of black holes, hire me.  My garden decadently overflows spring's bounty.  Front door, above, is not my home/garden, it belongs to a young woman.  Her mom renovated/styled the home, to perfection.  'Words', included !
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Love exceptions, and breaking rules.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

.

Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

How to Copy your Interior into the Landscape

 Tables, mantels, buffets, chests, demilunes, with toppers, aim my Garden Designs.

Scale, proportion, flow, color, texture, and balance.

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What?

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I copy your table top arrangements, in plants.

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Look around you.  There is a thread of continuity with your table toppers throughout your home.

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Laughter is included with my job.  Every time, every & each time, I finish a garden design the client says, "I love that!"  Well, of course.  I copied YOU.

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Which I think is hilarious.

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Then I get a check.

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You must admit this deepens the humor.

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Of course, too,  I use the right plants for entries, foyers, halls, parlours, double axis, focal points, staging of blooms throughout the year, fall color, berries, fragrance, ease of care, shading the house......then I want to exchange some of your windows for French doors, change the paint colors, & etc.

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All while the 'husband' was worried you hired a garden designer and he was going to have to pay for flowers.

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Flowers?  My stealth is far more wicked than 'husbands' comprehend.  Until it's too late, which means they've come on board as full team members.

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That satisfaction is my favorite bit of humor to savor.  

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Husbands call me 'that woman' to their wives, at first.  Within a month, generally, the wife will email or phone and say, "My husband said, 'ask Tara'....."

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At that point the poor dear man is within the clutches of 2 Cheshire cats!  

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And likes it.

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Yes, my job is quite humorous.

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Garden  & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pic found on net, lost provenance.

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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

.

Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Design Equation: Double Axis

 View from my office window, below.

Standing on the terrace, above, looking up to my office window, below.

Double Axis Equation: 
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View Out + View In = Double Axis
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pics in my garden.
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: home renovation, interior design, exterior design, painting & color choices, hardscape, pools, ponds, lawns, irrigation, patios, decks, farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Garden Pantry: Staples

Bare essentials, below.

Pair of square planters, pair of round planters, and jewelry.
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Just as salt/pepper are pantry staples, gardens have staples too.
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Love the garden jewelry, above.  Garden jewelry?  The rails.  Pure jewelry.  Lights too.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pic via Habitually Chic.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.

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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

Sofas: Backed vs. Facing

Pairs of sofas 'backed' began intriguing me a couple of years ago, after decades of adoring pairs of sofas facing each other, which is, of course, what I've had for a-very-long-time.

Cote de Texas posted this pic, above, the same day Laura, below, lept to the balcony in a smash/crash.

Once I get-me-a-man the French commode with urn on plinth will be between newly backed sofas.
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Laura, from that distance, cannot leap to the balcony.
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Decorating or catorating?
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Top pic Architectural Digest, a Mario Buatta room.  Bottom pic, apparently Laura's room, and soon to be mine again.  With pleasure my sofas need new fabric, and studying Buatta's room I will be getting a few extra pieces of furniture too.  Fine thoughts, indeed.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.

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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon