How to Copy Interiors into your Garden

She will have a stone roundabout with historic French church gargoyle setting atop a plinth of granite, at its center,  in her garden.

Quickly took pics in their home and realized, once I returned home & saw the pics, her Gargoyle Roundabout will be shaped like the central portion of the chinoiserie pattern, below, and outer line of the massed platters, above.

This happens all the time, designing in the garden and seeing validations inside the home.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pics same garden as previous posts.  She is also the queen of rugs, picking & placing.

Proscenium Design is Your Desire

Porch, turkeys, garden, a new trinity.  This is my job, below.  Do you see what I've done?  

Designed the garden as a proscenium to life.  

What does that mean?

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Garden is fabulous, marvelous, incredible 24/7 with little effort and a stage set for what life tosses.

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Look at the top pic again.

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It's taken from inside the house.  A snapshot that looks like a photo shoot.

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Not an accident.

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This garden is ready for Garden & Gun.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics sent from client last week.  She KNEW the turkey pic would THRILL me !!!!!!  Don't know Garden & Gun magazine?  You want to.

New Table Topper

Recent acquisition, below.  She shows 4 coats of paint thru the years, each different.

And the new harvest table, a birthday surprise.

Noticed the hen at my favorite Stone Mountain, GA Old Post Office Antique Mall before lecturing in Williamsburg, VA earlier this month.

Decided to buy her, if she was still there, when I got home.

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She's perfect.

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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara

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They wanted $20, got her for $15.  City prices, but I really wanted her.  Breakfast, in the pics, yesterday.  Why did I only buy 3 grapefruit, they taste like candy.

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.

Siting a Vintage Bell

They bought an old bell, below, and needed to know where to site it.

Have you considered where to put a bell historically?  Adore a new brain path.  Acreage, working acreage required signals.  Most important would be an emergency.  Secondarily, calling the hands to meals.  Here, above/below, the bell is close to the kitchen.

Soon the camellia hedge will obscure the cabin.  I do like the Double Axis pics, top/bottom.  Formal  & informal.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pics taken at jobsite this month.  Same garden as several previous posts.

Use a Plinth

Not the bird.

The plinth is divine.
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When the perfect focal point is not the right height, use a plinth.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pic Content in a Cottage.   Waiting at airports or restaurants Content in a Cottage is my go-to on the cell phone.  Love her pics and links.

The Best Time To Design

Design your garden for deep winter.

It will be pretty all year.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pic Belgian Pearls.
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Rosemary Verey wrote the best garden design book, The Garden In Winter.

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

Vanishing Threshold

This, below, is a disaster.

At a minimum prune the crape myrtle trunks into elegance, add sasanqua espaliers & sconces along fence.

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This room stops at the windows.  Why settle for so little?

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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

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pic via Cote de Texas. 

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By the Glamorous Age you must be able to have a couple of friends over for a delicious lunch you prepared in a lovely setting of garden & home.

Design Tools

Trinities are often a good template.

If you don't have matching pots, make sure the rims are each the same height.
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Of course this is also a marvelous display of repetition.  Your most important Garden Design tool.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pic Janelle McCulloch, Country Estates of Australia.  Visit Janelle's Library of Design.
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If you want a garden that is a moat of grace around your home & life, contact me.
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Details about online design services.
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Learn action steps to creating your best garden & home when you hire me to speak to your group.
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Details about lecture titles here.
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I've written several garden books available on Amazon.

Front Door Pendant Light

Endangered object, below.

Sweetly scaled pendant light.
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A front door is always a focal point.  When architecture & materials are already good why compete?  Beware 'too large' exterior lighting at your front door.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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pic via DIY Home Staging Tips.  You'll love the link, it's the best tips of Home Staging for 2012.  Of course, too many decades of USA homes lack good materials/architecture, mine is one, so you want to consider the possibility of large exterior lighting.  Then, beware of lipstick-on-a-pig.
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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.

Large Pots

Something new to desire.

                           
                        And I don't mean man or child.  How did I miss these pots in Paris?

Desire, undervalued & counterintuitive.
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Garden & Be Well,        XO Tara
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Wonder which client past/future will have these in their garden.  Love Magic Man, I know he can make them!  Will have to tack on a pair to an order for me-me-me !
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pics via Paris Through My Lens.

Rule for Pots

After seeing the Queen mother's pots at Glamis Castle I knew the Rule-For-Pots.

Pots in a garden must be so fabulous they can remain empty.
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These pass the test.
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Do yours?
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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When I lived on 50 acres in a 3 bay carriage house I saw my first Tulip Magnolia, Magnolia soulangiana, it was larger than this, above.  I walked to its trunk, wrapped my arms around it, held on, and stared up.  That was over 30 years ago.  It was obliterated years ago for a Wal-Mart parking lot.
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pic via Quintessence Lifestyle

What Is A Status Symbol?

Can you spot the status symbol?

In the land of freeways, subdivisions, strip malls, too many people?

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A meadow is status symbol.  A gravel/dirt drive with wildflowers & trees is status symbol.

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This is a CHOICE, above.  It is Landscape Design.  

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It's not a 'less than' drive because they couldn't afford to pave.  It's the intellect of knowing what's important in life.

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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara

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Pic via Habitually Chic. 

Color Echoes

Cute Kills in a garden

 Except when you like the cute.

 Pamela Harper wrote of color echoes in landscape design 2 decades ago.

 Advice to

follow.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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This is a new garden room.  It had been a few green meat balls & lawn.  Daylight basement level at the side of her home. 

How To Increase The Drama

Subtle drama, ego in check.  Pair of stone columns, iron gate, half-round stone steps & on axis a Japanese maple.  Not a gaudy statue or etc.

 Do you see the opportunity to increase the subtle drama, below?

Remove the pinestraw bed & let the turf flow to the stone wall.
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Small tweek HUGE impact.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pic taken last weekend at my lecture venue.

Trees vs. Mr.-Mow-Blow-Go-Testosterone-On-Wheels

I've taken Christopher Lloyd to bed again.  Already 2nd-3rd time for his books.  He's new & fresh, each time.

"By exercising  a little vision you will come to realize that the tree, which has a possible future, perhaps a great one, may be more important than yourself, nearing your end.  So it's worth thinking more about the tree and giving it a good start in life in the right position than about yourself, except in so far as it is a great delight to see the tree responding and developing under your sympathetic treatment."
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Cool your house in summer with an understory deciduous tree, it will warm you in winter too.  Site an evergreen tree in path of winter's winds.  Sited properly trees increase property value.  Chosen properly  insects/wildlife expand pollinator habitat.
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Studying Landscape Design across Europe for decades it's obvious what survives: trees, meadow, stone focal points.
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Mr.-Mow-Blow-Go-Testosterone-On-Wheels commodifies landscapes into grass to mow, bushes to prune, annuals to plant, chemicals to treat, irrigation system to install.
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Ok, I'll stop here.  Too quick getting from trees to Mr.-Mow-Blow-Go-Testosterone-On-Wheels.  Not enough time to pontificate fully today.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pic taken at a client's property last month.

Richness In Simplicity

Simplicities in my house, below, intensify

 my garden view.

Landscapes & interiors are double axis.
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How does your landscape look from inside your home?  It is art on the wall at every window.  Whether you think so or not.
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How does your home look from your landscape?  It is the focal point of your landscape.  Whether you think so or not.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics taken yesterday, a gray day with rain.  No flash for the pics.  Light streaming in, indirectly, from the garden.  My floor, banister, stairs, and me, each bathed in garden light.

Urns, Architecture & Sex

David W. Dunlap, in the New York Times last week, wrote about these urns, below.

 Heavy & fearing liability the building owner, Atria, decided to remove them.  (If I wasn't a Landscape Designer I would be selling roof finials.  We must have our arcane passions.)

 In a rare twist, Atria, after requests, replicated the urns in a lighter material (not cheap), above, to replace the old urns.

When she saw the old urns coming down, Kennedy Fraser, above, said, "It was one of the most traumatic days of my life."   A woman I understand.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Puppet Barbuda enthralled by Fraser, and wanting to know, "Where the h**l did the old urns go?", Googled for answers.  One must have priorities with their time when the to-do list is 4 centuries long.
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Delightfully, Puppet Barbuda was swept up in the sexual peccadilloes of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Violet Trefusis, a king & etc.  From a review of,  Mrs. Keppel And Her Daughter, in the New York Times, by Kennedy Fraser,
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" The English have always believed they can do anything they want as long as they do it in a foreign country. For the rest of her life, Violet lived in France or in the palace Mrs. Keppel bought for herself near Florence. Once the die was cast, Violet reached a truce with Denys. It was he who introduced her to the Princesse de Polignac, the former Winnaretta Singer. She was immensely rich and had had many lovers before Violet, including Romaine Brooks and Olga de Meyer, who was reputed to be one of Bertie's illegitimate children. The Princess's intimates were all gay and lesbian artists. She was a great art collector and patron of composers. Her salons were famous. Cocteau, Poulenc, Valery and Proust were frequent visitors. Like Kingy, she entertained opulently and with great ceremony; like him she was stout, middle-aged and far too grand for scandal to stick to. When she took her new favorite on a trip up the Nile, Mrs. Keppel, Pawpaw and Denys accepted the Princess's civil invitation to join them."
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Puppet Barbuda doesn't know where the old urns are.  In fantasy her guy with a truck, stuffed with heavy urns, are tootling back from NYC to a little garden in Stone Mountain, GA.
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Pics, by David w. Dunlap, from the NYTimes article.  

Landscape Jewelry

Last week, & for decades, the driveway was the focal point of this landscape.  

 Now, Urn/Plinth are a focal point on axis with the front door creating Pleasure Grounds.

 Urn/Plinth are quite large, the house is deceptively large with its 10' height at terrace level.

Most important, the Urn/Plinth can remain empty, or be planted.
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The quiet elegance of the Urn/Plinth are jewelry in the landscape.
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Jewelry a bit out of her comfort zone.  Enough to mention to her grown children it should be taken by one of them when her estate is dispersed.  You do remember what to ask yourself when buying a focal point for the garden, "Is this so wonderful it will be fought over at my estate sale?"
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Garden & Be Well,       XO Tara