Showing posts with label Muse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muse. Show all posts

Friday, July 7, 2017

Muse Answers the Right Questions Not Only those Asked

An interesting project is on my vintage portable wallpapering 'desk'.  Hired for their swimming pool, it has entirely too many plants.  The pool is rocking an outdoor kitchen, dining room, living room, huge Las Vegas style fire ring table, waterfalls, and other such things money can stuff into a small space.  My clients are the 2nd owners of the home.
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Knowing what to do with plantings directly at the pool didn't matter, Muse put the brakes on.  Client, a bonafide plant freak, has been pestering me, politely, about pool planting plan now-now-now.   Muse did not budge.  Finally, a few days ago, not thinking in the least about this pool/garden, Muse spoke and poured visuals into my realm.  Oh gosh.
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I sourced pics to print, and too wildly, discovered a couple of quotes directly related to this job.  Muse, for sure.  Made me laugh out loud in my office.
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Above the pool, built into a slope, is a lovely meadowed pasture rimmed with trees of our Piedmont.  Muse decided upon an orchard with summer house, exactly there.  I rather knew this at the 1st visit, but kept my mouth shut, I was hired for plantings at the pool.
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Muse decided upon simple Dutch styled gardens with heavy influences of Sir Edwin Lutyens & Frank Lloyd Wright.  If you know anything about both men, you know Frank baby stole shamelessly from Lutyens.  Bless his greedy heart, and his Muse for paying attention.  




Muse strayed provacatively throughout my clients entire property.  Their sloped front yard, must have a dry stack stone wall, and existing plantings streamlined into a nice Dutch/Lutyens/FLW.



This sloped property, above/below, owned by Matt Lauer & for sale, was Garden Designed by Miranda Brooks, it has 25 acres.  Seems like a lot of property to design, yet once started upon farmesque property even 300 acres isn't so much.  Crazy but true.






What a hoot, Muse.  Met with my client yesterday, she thought I had the completed pool planting plan, I did.  But that was the least of it.  Spilled the beans with her about Muse and why the pool plantings, in the scheme of things, are minor, compared to where her garden wants to go.
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More, client is a bit past age 50, Muse has spoken for her 80 year old self.
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Simple hedging, above, exactly the Dutch/Lutyens/FLW inspired work Muse vision quested into my head.
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At this point in the game husbands are very afraid of me.  If they brave it out, most do, they begin in later years to ask their wives, "What does Tara's Muse say about.......?"
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Muse is shocking in the most delightful of ways.  Finished, finally, a plan in Canada several weeks ago.  Muse was obdurate with it too.  I know to trust Muse, but it does begin to feel like life on a banana peel, awaiting the magic.  Back to Canada, a tiny minuscule garden.  Knew what to do, but Muse wouldn't let loose.  Finally.  Muse fixed their problematic deck.  Levels and size were involved which meant zoning issues.  Whew, Muse pushed it but all was approved.  Needed a Facetime appointment with owner of their construction team.  Loved him.  Loved.  Like the men on my team, taking what is designed and adding their magic/Muse too.
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Built gardens are a team effort.
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Don't have a garden Muse?  Read the best garden books written from across centuries, and tour gardens that are the best in the world.  Garden Muse adores that type of sustenance most.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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All pics, here.  

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Dots Connected: Agriculture, Water, Government, Gut Biome & Banking

Vintage ironstone, below, what do you see in the scene?  Decades, I saw, 'boring'.


Now, I see prayers of thanks, honoring the gift of Nature from Providence, its methods of provision, and more than simple survival, spiritual.  We are included in the cycle, as surely as the daffodil in spring.
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Spring's platter, honoring flowers of the guild, attracting widest variety of pollinators to the fruit trees, increasing yields by 80%.  Survival of man, pollinators, livestock, communities, nations.
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Commercial agriculture & livestock steps outside the circle of stewardship.  Water is poisoned, soil is killed, communities die, a nation's congress is bought.  ( Is 'sold' more correct?  Thank you to my dear readers sending missives elucidating where I am wildly wrong.  Why be a little bit wrong?)
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Fascinating science arriving about our gut bacteria, its role in our health.  From The Daily Mail, May 11, 2015, "

Everything you think you know about diets is WRONG: Counting calories is a total waste of time, it’s bacteria in your gut that make you fat and finally, cheese, alcohol and chocolate can all help"


"Professor Spector believes it’s down to the bacteria in our gut. He has found that the type and variety of our gut bugs have an astonishing influence on many aspects of our health.
‘Microbes are not only essential to how we digest food,’ he says. 
‘They also control the calories we absorb and provide vital enzymes and vitamins, as well as keeping our immune system healthy.’, full article.
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Following the money, a group of small farmers gathered almost a decade ago, brainstorming ways to keep money from leaving their county, discovering as time passed the idea had to grow from county to state to region.  This is hilarious, you already know where this is going, I'm sure of it.  
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The Atlantic,

Planning for Rural America's Economic Future

In Pottawattamie County, the agricultural sector is proving that innovative regional strategies can start anywhere.
"It has worked to train the next generation of farmers and to help existing farms with small-business coaching. Now, the county even collaborates with nearby Omaha, Nebraska, to help attract and keep corporations in the region instead of engaging in an economic border war across state lines, a development that too often plagues regional economic development.".
Continuing, "Part of the strategy to keep money in-state was to shift the type of farming that southwest Iowans engaged in from large industrialized farms to smaller operations that grew food that local people could eat. From this initial series of meetings was born the Southwest Iowa Food and Farm Initiative. The group has grown to a roster of more than 50 farmers, O'Brien says, with a smattering of local food-policy councils."  Full article.  
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From the 1960's Wendell Berry has written about the decimation of family farms, their way of life supporting more than a family, entire towns, conglomerated into states, and for most of USA's history, an entire country, agricultural.  More about USA's agricultural founders & its influence upon our form of government, read, Founding Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf.
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Back to the platter, 
Until post WWII people, world wide, knew Nature, its workings literally & metaphorically,  as survival to health of the body, spirit, and financial security.  
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Losing the connection, less than a century ago, science is proving Nature of more importance to our good health than our good actions with diet & anti-bacterial soap, working sedentary office lives, not in tandem with the seasons of the soil.
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Further, trying to financially stabilize & grow a dying rural USA, improves health for people, agriculture, livestock, water, soil.  A banking system as beneficial as local farming must be chosen.  
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Ellen Brown, takes banking the way I take agriculture, for the people, organic, honest, public banks.  She's a money farmer.  Without good banking matching good agriculture/livestock, the system is weak, money flowing away from communities.
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Ellen Brown, "Connecting the Dots – 05.06.15
At what point are you willing to challenge your own notions of what’s really going on? Can you even imagine that the mavens of the Money Power would threaten human survival to serve themselves for even bigger personal profits? Ellen’s guest, researcher Dane Wigington, has a trove of data to suggest that they would. And they do so in the form of geoengineering, a covert tool allegedly being used to control natural systems for private profit. We also hear commentary from Matt Stannard about the economics of the Baltimore uprising and from Marc Armstrong about America’s only publicly-owned depository bank, the Bank of North Dakota, which just issued its latest annual report — it’s another record-setting winner!
Listen here."
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California is currently turning water into a government resource/commodity, soon, your state will too.  A relief to discover there is new science, & engineering, about water.
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Ellen Brown, 

California Water Wars: Another Form of Asset Stripping?

"Tapping Underground Seas
Another untapped resource is California’s own “primary” water — water newly produced by chemical processes within the earth that has never been part of the surface hydrological cycle. Created when conditions are right to allow oxygen to combine with hydrogen, this water is continually being pushed up under great pressure from deep within the earth and finds its way toward the surface where there are fissures or faults. This water can be located everywhere on the planet. It is the water flowing in wells in oases in the desert, where there is neither rainfall nor mountain run-off to feed them.
study reported in Scientific American in March 2014 documented the presence of vast quantities of water locked far beneath the earth’s surface, generated not by surface rainfall but from pressures deep within. The study confirmed “that there is a very, very large amount of water that’s trapped in a really distinct layer in the deep Earth… approaching the sort of mass of water that’s present in all the world’s oceans.”
In December 2014, BBC News reported the results of a study presented at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which researchers estimate there is more water locked deep in the earth’s crust than in all its rivers, swamps and lakes together. Japanese researchers reported in Science in March 2002 that the earth’s lower mantle may store about five times more water than its surface oceans."  Full article here
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Back to the platter.
  
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A lot of writing in this post, more eloquently drawn, above, in my vintage ironstone platter.  Yet, I did not go into the realm of Providence, sure, all my words inadequate, the platter says it all.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Don't know what a guild is for fruit trees?  More, here.  

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Hemingway: Running From Crazy

Plenty of reasons not to like Hemingway: womanizer, booze, gambling.  Especially being a little girl growing up during the feminist era of the 60's.  His Key West, FL, bedroom, below.


After beloved Miss Louise & Aunt Tillie died I somehow ended up, in my 40's, with a copy of Hemingway's, A Moveable Feast.


It's repulsive how much I like Hemingway's writing.  Hemingway's, Pilar, above.


Running From Crazy, Barbara Kopple's new documentary about Hemingway's 'mental illness' doesn't mention 'addiction' in promotional materials.  Odd, yes?  (Hemingway's pool, above, "“ . . .The swimming pool is wonderful -it is very large and the water, from away under the reef, is fairly salt. Also it lights up at night -I find that each underwater bulb is five times the voltage of the one bulb in the light house across the street, so the pool must be visible to Mars -it is wonderful to swim around in a sort of green fire, one’s friends look like luminous frogs . . .”, Elizabeth Bishop.)



(Had to include Hemingway's treasure box, above.  A past client had one & it was loaded with heirloom silver pieces, more than Jack Sparrow could imagine.)

Hemingway's home now, above.


Ca. 1933, above, Hemingway's garden as he knew it, Jane Austen 'rustic'.  Much better than the 'neat' garden tourists demand.
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Garden & Be Well,       XO Tara
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Pics via Hemingway Home.
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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.


Wednesday, July 8, 2009

FEEDING THE MUSE

Designing landscapes is science & poetry. After college I thought science would be enough. Ha. Science is easy. It's the poetry I'm after. When the Muse is not fed what remains is science.
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Feeding the Muse? Books, music, travel, pets, movies, friends, collage, gardening, spirit & serendipity.
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A shortcut, 3-4 seconds by car. This stern building, below, variously abandoned or occupied thru the years, feeds the Muse. Building, meadow, trees, all delight. Its current incarnation redolent of its caretakers.

Many years pass with debris & unkempt trees/bushes. Not now. The motivation is a belief in God.

The delight, in a city of millions, of trees-mosses-broomsedge-more caressing the side of my car at road's edge. This is the extent of the woodland & road.
Taking me back to Europe, each time I travel the road, of the many church's I've seen maintained with sweat equity vs. money.



There are no graves at the Flat Rock Primitive Baptist Church, what a name, but there are sacraments in the ground, below. Perfect atonement of roots-soil-moss-lichens-more.

Taking these pictures and seeing for the 1st time lace curtains. Hung with love.

Someone keeps the grounds clear as has been done in Europe for centuries. Seeing human spirit, not lack of landscape or architecture. Its very lack creating richness.

Seeing, above, in this side of the church another church and its side, below.


Flat Rock Primitive Baptist Church hasn't the provenance of the church, above, but it does.


At its base, a crown of lichens. Atonement: building-man-earth-spirit.
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Exactly the job of a landscape design, atonement of home-garden-earth-life.
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Garden & Be Well, XO T