5 Important Covered Porch Design Elements

Hope the luxury of designing a porch is yours, not a previous owner.

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1.  Plenty of electrical outlets.  Every wall should have 1 or more electrical outlets.  Enough electrical outlets to disturb your electrician.  Never, in my experience, does an electrician understand this.  (Nor spouse.)

2.  Place can lights, below, away from fan blades.  Who wants haunted house strobe lights?

3.  Do not use off-the-shelf lattice.  Lattice, below, is special order, a bit thicker wood, looks custom, costs minimally more.

4.  Detail the walls & ceiling.

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5.  Choose colors that flow from your interiors inside the covered porch & colors that flow from your home's exterior to the outside of your covered porch.

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At jobsite yesterday we 'vision quested' furniture to source/buy/reuse/place, art to hang, tv, etc.

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Yes, it was fun.

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This porch has done something quite special.  It has given her a new house.  It began as a deck 1/2 the size of the new covered porch.  A never used deck.

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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.

Designing a Garden to Interact in your Life

A celebration this month in one of my gardens.

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3 decades of photographing gardens.

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Gardens.

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This garden, that evening, a wild 'need' to shoot people.

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Friends, below.  Their story brings sweet tears to the cheeks.

Happy daughter, below, waiting for her dad to bring back petits fours in a take-home box.

Every note, below, a lament to life's abiding.

Sisters, below.  And a peak at those petifores.

Beyond grace, atonement & joy, this garden has crossed an unknown threshold & gardens me in return.
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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

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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.

2 Important Facts about the Pots in your Garden

All of your pots must be so wonderful they can remain empty.

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Every pot you own should be so fabulous it's fought over at your estate sale.

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A pot by Deborah Silver, below.

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Curating pics to Pinterest many Deborah Silver pots are on my Focal Points board.

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Her pots are seriously well chosen and the plantings majestically yet simply arranged.

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I subcontract pots, well executed pots, to 3 different specialty companies.

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Look around your garden today.  What are your pots telling you?

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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

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Pic from Deborah Silver.

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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: Hired to Solve Problems

A current job with incredible modern ca. 1970 architecture, revived with a superior architect ca. 2014, has major challenges.

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Garbage cans, 4 of the hurly-burly-honkers, in front of the house.  

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And.

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Minimal parking trying to shoot you & your car off a cliff.

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Welcome home. 

Have never dealt with this parking problem.

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Solution?

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Balls or low flat planters.

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Have gathered several resources for both and look forward to what the client chooses.

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There is more than 1 right answer.

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Better a car is dented than shot over the hill.

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I adore problem gardens.

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 I'm hired to solve problems.

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Balls with plinths would be awful, want 3 balls, top pic, without plinths.

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If they choose the low planter, I do like its plinth.  And want a round large ball of chicken-wire covered in small leaf ivy and drip irrigation.

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Their lifestyle is more suited to the Balls.  Less maintenance.

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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.

Creating 'Natural': Follow Nature's Template

Past a certain age when a friend has a Bucket List Wish you can make happen.  You do.

 She had always dreamed of hiking the Appalachian Trail. I hadn't hiked it in over a decade.

With serendipity, yet needfully, we saw this above/below, from the ridge of the Eastern Continental Divide.

Overwhelmed in the moment it was later, in bed, I think how perfect the peaks & 'V's are for siting canopy & understory trees.   Perhaps a combination of daffodils and blue grape hyacinths.

Yes, I will come back as needed to these pictures.  To perfectly site a 'Natural' landscape.
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Nothing worse than trying to be 'Natural' and instead it merely looks stupid.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pics taken this 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

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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.

Screened Porch: Furniture Texture

Furniture textures are important.  In addition to color.

A new covered screened porch, above/below, with warmth & welcome.

Patio/deck/porch/garden furniture is too often in 'sets' with matchy-watchy pieces too.

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What is this hold garden furniture ads have over popular imagination?

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Of course they want you to buy sets.

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Most often, why would you do that?

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However, there are lovely exceptions.  

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Be sure you are one before embarking upon sets of matchy-watchy garden furniture.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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pics this week in a client 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.

                                                                                 .

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.

Conservatory in a Tiny Garden Rustique

This week in my garden, below.  Small, less than 8500sf, it never bores.

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Potted hydrangea setting bud, below, blooms all summer.  Behind the hydrangea camellia sasanqua blooms all fall.  Left of the hydrangea a camellia japonica blooms all winter.  Hellebores in stone terrace, bloomed all winter, pruned down for summer.

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Behind this curtain are a stone terrace set in dirt, tea olives, azaleas, daphne, crape myrtles, red buds, sarcococca, roses, viburnum, aucuba, liriope  & etc....

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Not a day in the year does my garden lack blooms, structure or beauty.

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WITHOUT EFFORT.

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However, those are not salient facts.

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Maximum pollinator habitat is the most important detail.  Which includes subsidiary effects.
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No fertilizer to kill mycorrhizal fungi, earthworms or poison groundwater.  No need to even mention insecticides.  And, a potager producing 80% more produce with the increased pollinators.  In addition, no lawn to mow-water-feed.  Picking up on the time-effort-money this type of garden saves?
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Shade during summer cuts electric bills by 40% with leaves dropping allowing the sun to help heat my house.  Aside from mental health this little garden has given me a career.  Very nice, but more greatly, purpose backed with passion.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Conservatory is rescued doors/windows with siding from a century old fishing cabin torn down at Lake Burton.  Chandelier, wood stove, antiques, gravel floor, lamps-more-lamps, and my wireless reaches to the Conservatory.  Go me !  For a decade my garage held the gathering storm of this Conservatory.  
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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.

.

Construction by Award Winning:

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

Howard's End & Hydrangeas

"Howards End is permeated by a feeling of revulsion towards the unpleasant, gritty realities of urban life, the unsightly decay and squalor of the city. Forster establishes strong contrasts between 'City' and 'Country' early in the novel when he draws the distinction between 'England' and 'Suburbia' as different countries, and when he comments of Margaret Schlegel:..,."

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"Like many others who have long lived in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various [London] railway termini. They are out gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. (Howards End, p. 12)"

"By the time of Howards End's publication in 1910, the progression of urbanisation and industrialisation across Britain had brought huge social change. Between 1870 and 1911 some 250,000 acres in Great Britain went out of cereal production, and during these years of agricultural depression many labourers moved into the cities or emigrated from the country altogether. Helen Schlegel remarks, 'London's creeping', with reference to the gradual encroachment of the suburbs upon the country estates, farm land and green pastures of England. Margaret 'knew that her sister spoke truly', and reflects that 'the melting-pot was being prepared for them' (Howards End, p. 355). Forster faces the problem of urbanisation head-on in his essay 'The Challenge of Our Time', published in Two Cheers for Democracy in 1951. He acknowledges the necessity of tearing down the slums and re-housing their inhabitants, but he also expresses a deeply felt concern with regards to the destruction of his 'England' caused by the encroaching developments. 'I cannot,' he concludes, 'equate the problem. It is a collision of loyalties.'..."

"This idea of flux, of change and of shapelessness, is inextricably linked with the historical fact of the shifting masses. The working classes live in those 'modern dwelling-place[s] that strike a shallow makeshift note', since they have been 'too easily gained, and could be relinquished too easily' (Howards End, p. 50). Their movements - for example, those of the Basts, who 'had just been evicted for not paying their rent, and had wandered no one knew whither' - contribute largely to the 'nomadic civilisation' of which Forster despairs (Howards End, pp. 272-73)...."

"Then Margaret spoke rather seriously. 'I think,' she said, that our race is degenerating. We cannot even settle this little thing; what will it be like when we have to settle a big one?' (Howards End, p. 165)..."

Not city, not suburbia, my little garden, designed Pastoralism, saves my soul.
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Walking my garden yesterday morning, pics above, I hear conversation between Leonard Bast & Helen Schlegel from Howard's end.  E.M. Forster is smiling.
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Why garden?  This is my answer.
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Intuitively, all of the above, & more, is deeply felt.  Yet, a choice for joy is made, new, each day.
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When I am told, "Not every one can be happy like you.", I smile and think, "You haven't got a clue."
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Quotes from, here.
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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.

Front Porch: Foundation Plantings or Steps?

Easy knowing they use their front porch, below.  Mosquito repellent sitting at the French doors on the right.

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Their front yard is large & they have children.

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Foundation plantings here are an interesting choice.

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Of course, they have a fabulous large back yard too.

Privacy isn't needed otherwise the foundation plantings would be a bit taller.

Would you, if this were your home, keep the foundation plantings or move them & replace with steps?
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Plant selection is perfecto.  Large house & garden, 2 careers, children, dogs, and a yard easy to maintain.
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Always ask questions.  Makes you an instant garden designer.
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If this were a town home front porch it's amazing how a bit of height on the foundation plantings provide a sitting area with privacy.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics at a soiree last weekend.  This house is close-in Atlanta.  A pocket of woodland in the city.    
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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.

Transitioning Style: Garden Rooms Different than Interior Rooms

Beyond the house, in their garden, is the rose garden with cottage.

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Formal.

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Quite obvious what type of garden room is next.

Rustic, and wild, below.

Truly, one of the best waterfalls, any continent, residential/commercial, I've ever seen.
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Garden rooms are easy to style.  They contrast formal to rustic and back again.  For many centuries now.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pics taken last week in the Paul/Lisa Brown 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.

                                                                                 .

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.

Elements of a Garden: What do you see?

Formal with informal.

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Designed garden with controlled woodland.

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Garden rooms flow in contrast to each other.

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Color theme, green-brown-white.

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High density & low density for maximum pollinator habitat.

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Every garden room needs at least 1 cone shape.

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Cone shapes draw eyes to the sky.

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Cone shapes are hard to design, easy to do too many.

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Pair of cone shapes at an entry way expand the invitation.

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Contrasting shades of green,

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Contrasting sizes of foliage.

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Designed for structure 12 months of the year.
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Clipped hedging.
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Axis.  Double axis.
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Paths easy to walk.
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Fencing & gates chosen to flow with the house.  How do I know?  I just do.
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Stone in the paths matches stone elsewhere in the garden and on the home.  How do I know?  I just do.
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What did you see when you looked at this pic?
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Lost provenance on the pic.
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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.