Showing posts with label Mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mystery. Show all posts

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, March 6, 2013

Design Interiors From Outside

Front porch, below.


 Lamp seen from the front porch, above, and from inside, below.


Further to the left of the lamp, below.


You do know this already?  Interiors must be gorgeous from every garden view.
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Your home is the focal point of the garden.
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Walking with new clients, around their garden, seeing an ugly interior view I will turn my head, look into their eyes and my right eyebrow goes up.  Enough said.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pics taken at jobsite last week.  Same home as previous several posts.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Landscape Design Solutions

Scored concrete & a roundabout of pavers in the parking court, below, diminish its 'nature'. Softens the impact.From their fabulous patio, below, a view into the garden via an enfilade with the parking court. Every landscape has its thorns. Mostly 2 cars, more with family/friends.
Another view from the fabulous patio, below.
The foyer between parking court & patio, above. I removed the turf & put in rosemary behind the bench, 1 Michelia figo behind that & etc. Both evergreen & fragrant. Views from the patio with the plantings will obscure views of the parking court & block neighbor's views into the gate of garden/patio/home. (Double Axis with little input AND no mowing, weedeating, yet adding privacy, fragrance, increased property value, & better curb appeal.)
More of the same foyer, above. Copied rosemary behind the bench, Abelia 'Rose Creek' behind that & etc. Mystery created! From the patio you'll see hints of the fabulous garden. From the garden you'll see hints of the fabulous patio. Of course, the parking court is diminished.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Turf, pic above, removed also. Used pairs of boxwood at the sidewalks leading from parking court into the parterre. Used repetition with the Abelia and existing Pittosporum. (Pittosporum, viewed from the parterre, will block views of the front of the cars.) Repetition, is a potent Landscape Design tool.
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Same Macon, GA garden as the past few posts.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Foyer, Hallway, Doorway

Welcome to the foyer, below. Beyond the terra cotta urn on a plinth is a hall leading to a frontdoor (iron gate). Ah, creation of mystery & privacy.
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MORE, poppets, if you can stand it !!! Gate & terra cotta urn are on axis with the bronze hatted girl in the previous post.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Saturday, January 16, 2010

4SOME: CLUB, WING & ADIRONDACK

Adirondacks were the 1st 4some I saw outside. And LOVED. A client had a 4some of club chairs w/ottoman at their center, inside their home. Gorgeous.
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Now, wingchairs in 4some, above, outside. Yes!!!
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What works here?
* No foundation planting.
* Vines on the house.
* Color: bricks, chairs, pots, foliage, flowers, sky.
* Pots: size, plantings, placement.
* Scale.
* Flow.
* Axis.
* Contrasting textures. Dark leaves by chartreuse leaves. Big leaves by small leaves.
* Canopy & understory trees.
* Walls: plants & house.
* 4SOME of Chairs. Comfort.
* Invitation. Steps leading you further, if only in imagination. Doors, beckoning the great indoors.
* Mystery. Yes, I want to see this garden. Yes, I want to go inside this house.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic from Maison Sud-Ouest, via, Garden Rooms. Had to show it to you. This garden has stuck in my head as pure pleasure.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

LANDSCAPE DESIGN with CARL JUNG & BILL BLASS

Carl Jung said, Our lives are about getting the outside to match the inside.
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Can you describe the landscape in your imagination? Good, you've begun.
Until yesterday I wasn't aware the world offered lace shoes. Before the year is out I will picnic with girlfriends, all wearing lace shoes, upon soft meadow & moss.
The languor, and joys, of summers in Milledgeville, GA circa 60's are in my DNA. Those summers are in my landscape now.

Did you know stone & gravel mirror back the stars & moon? You can read a book of poetry without electric or candle light upon a stone terrace past midnight in your garden.

Using the toughest pass along & native plants brings birds, butterflies & honeybees. Creating gardens surviving on rainwater. And no fertilizer.
Be who you are. Oddly, you'll have to be brave to be who you are, even for your garden.

Bill Blass said, A woman with a closet full of clothes but nothing to wear doesn't know herself very well.
Soon my closet will have a tutu & lace shoes.
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Pics from Julia and aren't they fabulous?
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Sunday, March 22, 2009

CREATING MYSTERY

The average landscape is seen at a glance. BORING. Fabulous landscapes share a trait: MYSTERY.
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Fabulous landscapes delight the eye and tease the intellect.
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With eye & intellect engaged feet follow. Is your landscape doing this?
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Above, through my camellias a hint of the terrace. Beckoning, Come see me.
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Once at the terrace, Where will you be beckoned next?
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And you know you will be, don't you?
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara