Showing posts with label Doorstep Gardening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doorstep Gardening. Show all posts

Friday, June 27, 2014

Does Your Landscape Describe You?

Beside the front porch, below, is the mudroom entrance.
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 I feel the welcome & delight in each detail.


The wreath is in honor of the Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival & this home/garden are on the tour.
Been in Southern Living magazine too.


As if the bench still-life were not enough, the little wall, below, along the path is 'done' too.


Precociously my Tara Dillard garden design rule, "I must know who you are from the garden before ever entering your home.", is wowza answered here.
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Today, seriously look around your garden & home's exterior.  Do they tell me who you are?
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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.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Front Porch: Formal + Informal


Design Rule: Contrast.
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A touch of the Queen + Ellie Mae Clampett.
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Urn on Plinth + Galvanized Buckets hanging with ropes.

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Your garden must tell me who you are before stepping inside your home.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pic taken this month.  Jeri Farmer's lovely home/garden was on the Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival Garden Tour.  Jeri & Susanne refreshed the garden this year and time/money were both running short yet pots were still needed for the ferns.  Of course Susanne said, "Put them in galvanized buckets."
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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.

Friday, May 2, 2014

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.
.
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.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Port Cachere: Before + After

I was hired to 'refresh' the landscape.
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Leaving the port cachere as-is was not an option.  This is their main family door.  
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We went shopping at the Americas Mart in downtown Atlanta last month sourcing merchandise.  Not everything had arrived by this week but enough to get started, below.


This table is temporary, above-below, a very nice temporary.  Soon, once a vintage large French buffet is sourced I'll get you more pics.


I made do with the few pots/flowers she had last Monday, above/below.


Small moments of beauty, above.
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As she gets into her car to leave, and then returns, her port cachere is embracing arms for going into the world & returning from the world.  A matriarch in every layer of her life, she has a lot going on and appreciates all Providence provides.  It's in the small moment thanks are deeply felt.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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pics taken at jobsite last Monday.

Monday, November 18, 2013

Doorstep Gardening


A bit of vine & gravel to the house.


Repeated across continents for centuries.
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Affordable to install, inexpensive to maintain.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic via A Bloomsbury Life.  After years of lust for gravel & vine I did it for myself.  Still curious why I waited so long.

Monday, November 4, 2013

Front Door: Create an Entry


Ceilings are not high, below.  A transom was over the door.  I removed it and added a taller door & sidelights.  Creating more height,
I chose 2 panels + the upward curve.  Love the doorknocker Miss Florida found.  We did a lot of back/forth online with knockers & paint color & hardware.   


Urns fabulous enough to be empty were designed & plinths  for height adjustment.  Ironically, Miss Florida, who always says, I don't know anything, has consistently put in seasonal arrangements from prunings in her garden.


I also took away the foundation plantings, aka green meatballs, and used espaliered fruit trees + groundcovers.
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The white is too white on the house.  Alas, it had just been painted before I was hired.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pics taken at jobsite last week.  We are doing a new layer!  The drive, front woodland & upper arrival drive.  Cannot wait for the groundcovers to fill in, brown dead mulch, anywhere, has touched my last nerve.
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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

French Planter: Color

I put these planters across the front of a home last Saturday, though a bit larger.  


However, zero temerity for foundation plantings, plenty of gracious #89 granite gravel.


Not this big, above, but did put in this size for a home needing to hide garbage cans.
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Taxus x media 'Hicksii', pruned similar to Great Dixter's, is the plant choice.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Top pic Old Long Island, bottom pic, Things That Inspire.  .
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Color.  Client house is gray, white trim, black shutters, apple green door.  Planters can be any of those but white.  A nice amount of space but not quite enough to handle the boldness of white.  Apple green is my choice but the gray or black are acceptable too.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Front Porch: A Way to Test Design

Good design is pretty, comfortable, affordable, leverages activities and your spirit.
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Good design is also 'testable'.


With a camera.  Can you take spur-of-the-moment pics and they are worthy of a magazine, catalogue or book cover?
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If you must 'style' your pics so far from how you truly live in the space you're not done designing the space.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pics Susanne Hudson's front porch, last month, which is mere feet from a busy road.
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Last weekend a client showed me a pic of her baby granddaughter in the garden.  It could have been used in a magazine for toddlers. A quick snap without thought of the background beauty.  And that was intentional in the Garden Design.  The client 'got it' after the pic.  Granddaughter, grandma & designer....trinity of happy!

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Front Porch: Long & Narrow

Placing table + chairs at the 'L' of a porch must be in the helix of our DNA.


The web has enough pictures to fill a seductive hardcover coffee table book.


 At the opposite end of the porch, above, more seduction, below.




Places to read, serve a meal, have conversation a basic trinity for your porch.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics shot last month on Susanne Hudson's porch.  A field gathered collection of furniture with a tight trinity of color: green, brown, white.  Comfort oozes in her still life's.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

What's the View from Your Porch Door?

Diffusing the view, Kimberly Queen, below.  Tolerates full baking sun or part shade, and she's not a shaggy mess unlike the Boston fern.


On perfect axis with the porch door, below, she diffuses the view in too.  Aka, double axis.


The lattice?  Regular, common, off the shelf, a disaster for any home but, in context, understandable here.  This home was rescued and is the Cultural Arts Center in Douglasville, Georgia.
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Back to the lattice.  For pennies more special order panels with thicker wood slats, they look custom.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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The fern stand is real, and almost a century old.  Been decades since it held a fern.  Pics taken earlier this month at the Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival in Douglasville, GA.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Perfect Front Porch

Of course the patina of the rooster is white.  It's her theme.


To the left of their front door, below.


To the right of their front door, below.




Mary Poppins said it best, "Practically perfect in every way."
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pic same garden as previous post.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Basement Door is now the Dowager's Porch

It's common to see a basement door with lawn.  And nothing else.


Mother-in-law Suite doesn't aptly describe this rendition.


Common furnishings, off the shelf shutters, a simple arbor, concrete pavers & voila !


Color theme was chosen and leveraged with punches of yellow.




Boxwoods, liriope, hollies prettier AND easier to maintain than ubiquitous lawn.  Notice, above, the garbage can?


Between driveway & Dowager's Porch is a tiny foyer, above.  Gravel, above, pure brilliance.
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Most basement doors are the throw-away-zone.  Worse, the criminal zone.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics taken last weekend at the Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival.  This garden belongs to Jeri Farmer, co-founder of the PMHF with Susanne Hudson.  Susanne helps Jeri with her Garden Design.  

Friday, May 31, 2013

In Relationship

If your secondary subsidiary focal points


are 'animals' make sure they are in


relationship to their surroundings.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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For many years I maintained a small  townhome back garden for a client.  She had a little rabbit that I would move each week, as if it were nibbling her flowers.  Her garden was always done on Fridays, her area of town has the BEST estate sales.  These cats are at my front door, pics taken this month.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Potting Table: A Template

 Outside my Conservatory is a space asking, just last week, for a potting table.  This, below, is the template.  


No different than putting interior rooms together.
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Perhaps once/twice/year will need to use it for potting.
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Will style it with ivy topiaries for the house.  A pair of lamps.
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Zinc top with Benjamin Moore Alexandria beige legs.
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Now, on mission at the thrift stores.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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pic via Habitually Chic.  Of course there is a slight slope to the space, need to cut/fill the area.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

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.
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"

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 .
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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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.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Side Porch

The kitchen has a door to the side porch. 




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

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

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?
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pics taken last weekend, same garden as previous post.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Japanese

Invitation.  




 "...eternals as applicable in the smallest of spaces as in the vast acres of a country house garden." Sir Roy Strong.  Above, vast as a mountain range.


Water Mirror, miroir d'eau, above.




Water breaks the footprint of the Tea House, above.  Small touch, huge impact.


Looking outward, above, from the bamboo window seen coming in the entry, top pic.


Framing the view, above, for centuries this has been done.  Is a brick ca. 1960 ranch less worthy?


Hidden, then meandering, above, then spilling into the pond, below.


Why, above, do we like walking on water?

 At the minimum, 2 stones.  Male & female.  Earth & sky.  Ying & yang.  Even the shadows are benevolent.


Leaving the Japanese garden from its other side, above, into a pecan orchard.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pics taken Massee Lane Garden last weekend.