E.M.Forster: Walking the Garden at Dusk with Mrs. Wilcox

Dusk yesterday, below.  I had been inside reading but the Chinese snowball blossoms beckoned.  

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E.M.Forster,  Howard's End,  "...Continually contrasting the "seen" with the "unseen"--the physical, material world of the Wilcoxes with the imaginative, spiritual world of the Schlegels--Forster posits the possibility..." 

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Decades before reading Forster peering in has been a delight.

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Is your garden pretty from inside?  Is your interior pretty from the garden?  Vanishing Threshold = 'yes' to both questions.

My dear friends (aka Viburnum macrocephalum - Chinese snowball), above/below, pulled me away from reading, Diana Vreeland, Memos - The Vogue Years.

This is a garden.  

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Best friend.  Nurturer.

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House & garden, armor harbor strength metaphor atonement listener humorist joy independence spirit music life love.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pics yesterday at dusk in my garden.

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Tara Dillard Garden Designs installed by 

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Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home builder, from renovations to neighborhoods. Heard's Landscaping, commercial/residential construction, hardscape-irrigation-lawns-grading-pools-lighting-stone-decks.  Three decades of service.

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Shaefer Heard

Get Your Layers of Design Right

Every home needs a desk, every barn needs a desk, every garden needs a desk.

Every design project has its layers.  Completed layers, above.  Beginning layers, below.

I will always have a job.  Always.  Why?  It's DNA to put the wrong layers in first, in a garden.
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What are the wrong first layers of a garden design?  Pretty flowers.  All roses.  Mostly perennials.  Tons of hosta.  Yes, that list will keep me in a job, forever (forevah).  So, Tara, what's wrong with roses, perennials...., easy, no evergreen structure, zero relationship with the house & you've begun with high maintenance.
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Desk, above, is already years in the making.  Why?  We've been creating paths, drives, focal points on axis with the interiors, planting evergreen hedges, then flowering shrubs......
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Ironically, nurseries conspire to keep me working hard.  How?  They push annuals, lawns with needy chemicals-watering-mowing, blah blah blah & blah (are we even in the same industry?  Passed a nursery sign last week, "Kill your weeds now."  Yes, I will always have a job.)
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What is the first layer of a Garden Design to consider?  Views, main axis, from inside your home into the garden.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Top pic Susanne Hudson's garden, bottom pic at a client garden last weekend.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Oscar de la Renta: Simple Garden Trinity

Backdrop + bench + meadow = Fabulous Garden.  A trinity working hard long before Christ's era.

Dark green + Chartreuse green = Fabulous

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Thank you Oscar for playing dress-up in a garden.

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Within simplicity, aside from elegance, you'll discover Albert Einstein's, 

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"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Oscar's book, updated, Here.

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Choosing Exterior Paint Colors

Exterior colors begin inside.  Wallpaper, sofa, art are your resources.  Especially for the front door.

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Trim & window colors are often dictated by the brick, stone, or mortar, on your home.

Exterior colors should look old the first day they are applied.  No waiting.  Benjamin Moore Historic Colors are a favorite.

I'm hard on my interior.  Loving faded colors on wood & textiles.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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pics in my kitchen yesterday.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

Gardens: Flow First, then Plants

"What plant should I put there?", is the common question.

Choosing specific plants is the last thing I put into a Garden Design.
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Flow is the first.
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What is flow?
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What direction do most people approach your home from?  Where do you park?  Which door do you mostly enter your home from?  Where are your garbage cans?  What path do you traverse to the garbage cans?  Where do your guests park?  Where do your children park?  Do you have dogs needing to go outside?  Where are your garden tools & how do you access them?  Where is the compost pile and how often do you walk to it?  Do you gather firewood in winter to carry inside?  After a storm do you have branches to pick up and where do you place them?  Where are your outdoor lights?  Can you walk, without obstruction, around your entire home?  How do you get from your deck/patio to the back yard?  Raining, can you walk your property without getting your feet in puddles?  Do you have young children/grandchildren needing a safe place to play?  Where should you put a swing-set?  How should the swimming pool be placed?  Where should the new barn be sited?  Which door do you use to get the mail?  Which door do guests knock on first?  Do guests come to the door you want them to?  Where is the fire hydrant and is it a clear path in case of fire?  Where is the circuit breaker for the house & can it be turned off quickly by emergency personnel if you are not home?  How often do you need to walk to the Pole Barn?  Where should the Conservatory be placed & how often will you use it for meals?  And, etc.
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Yes, Flow before plants.
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Get the flow right and your property begins at the center of your home to the property lines.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Trinity: Stewardship, Wendell Berry, Chickens

The chickens will bring eggs, I thought.  

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Instead, they've given stewardship.

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8 heirloom chics, 4 breeds.  Some cats others livestock in personality.

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Nothing from the kitchen is wasted, every restaurant meal ends with asking for a left-over container.  Girls go wild for pizza.

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Almost 3 decades in my garden, What would it be now with their poop the entire time?

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More, What would I be like?  Yes, the girls have taught that much.

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Ironically, seeing several clients over a spread of years showed how easy chics are to caretake.

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Sadly, the Stewardship was invisible.

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America was founded upon this Stewardship.  Culture bypassed its tenants.

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  A particular client educates me with every third sentence and every hour starts a sentence, Wendell Berry says.  How can I not pass Wendell Berry along to you?

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Founding Gardeners, is the resource for Stewardship.

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I found what I wasn't looking for, one of life's deepest veins of gold.  From chickens?

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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Garage/Atalier: Leverage Life & Garden

 Aside from the ubiquitously expected, your garage must leverage your life.  Beautifully.
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In my garage, below.

 Adore loading my so-ugly-it's-cute van for work, below.

Tools, chandeliers, speaking props & etc all awaiting to make life easier.

Vintage French garden chair made the move to the chicken coop.  And the ca. 1918 door is now a table in the office.

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How well does your garage leverage the caretaking of your garden?  Your life?

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Did you know this is an element of Garden Design?

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I didn't, until I went to Europe to study history's best gardens.  

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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara

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Pics in my atalier, aka garage.  

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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A Garden View at Work

Have you done this for your office?  The view?

Who is this painter?  Caring so for the outside coming inside?

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Could he paint you at work in your home?

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With your garden as benediction.

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Henrik Nordenberg artist, link to his work.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

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Benediction.  The word wasn't thought up, merely arrived.  "A benediction (Latin: bene, well + dicere, to speak) is a short invocation for divine help, blessing and guidance"

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As a child I assumed gardens spoke to everyone.  As an adult I recognize their grace and heed their guidance.

The Proper Direction of Stewardship in a Garden

"We discover G*d's presence inside whenever we override our ego's pride and courageously put aside all that we hide."  Rabbi David Aaron

From the mailbox & gravel drive, above, my best work begins.  

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Getting here was decades.  Learning simplicity & the humility to let the site speak without reference to my 

skills.  Honestly, I wonder how Providence has time for anyone else, attention lavished upon my character defects never wains.
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Nor must I 'own' this site.  My pride/ego is rooted in the work.  A walled orchard is built, a gravel drive spread, potager planted and more, and with each, they are taken by the owner's hands before my feet leave the site.
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I'm in love with this site, and so is the owner.  It is very much the 3 of us.  That is how strongly we relate to these acres.  She is a good steward of her acres and in return I get to watch her acres in stewardship of her.
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Gifts of loving these acres arrive in many forms & layers.  Telling us we are doing the right thing/s.
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Tasha Tudor's favorite line of poetry, 'take joy', in action.  Joy is always there, but it must be taken.
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What does any of this have to do with you?  Stewardship.  Not your stewardship of the garden.  But the stewardship your garden has for you.  Do you have that in your life?  Are you in relationship with your garden?  Does it fill you with joy, enrich your spirit, give you energy just seeing it from the windows of your home?  Good news, it's not about acres & money.  It's putting the garden into relationship with your home & life with historic templates.
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This reads a bit like an altar call.  Ironic, she says her deep feeling with her garden is 'abiding', I feel 'atonement' in mine.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pic at jobsite this month.  Silent Partner, I can see your face reading this and know you understand the metaphorical use of filthy lucre.
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My garden is one of my best friends, unconditionally loving, rich in narrative.  A language I can understand.  People?  No, easier to understand my garden.  
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1.  If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.
   

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   Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

 

Using Color Restraint with Intensity

Intense restraint and another example of the color trinity green-brown-white.

Restraint so intense the terrace has become a proscenium for guests.
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Subtlety so rich the bluestone & granite become focal points.
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Humbling execution.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pic Wendy Posard and Associates.  Definite teamwork between architect & owners.
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2 Tara Dillard questions a patio must answer, 'Is this patio so fabulous I must see inside the house?', 'Is this patio so incredible I must see the garden?'.  Yes & yes.

Refreshing: Interior Plants Do Not Look Store Bought

Notice something extraordinarily different about the plants styling the dining room, below?

They look as if they came from the conservatory on site.
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Quite rare to see this attention to detail, though saucers should be included with the coleus & orchid for a complete narrative.  (I have clients on tours, in magazines, TV, so, yes, I'm paid to be this particular!)
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And that doesn't begin to mention the delicious focal point on axis with the vanishing threshold.
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Nice, indeed.  Well done.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pic Architectural Digest.  Cote de Texas had the pic on a post about wall paper recently.
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  If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

A Man in the Garden

Decades without one, this new thing of having a man in my garden is......

We agree to disagree.  And when we do agree, much time passes before action.

In the house, he's..........superb.

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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

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pics Hollywood.

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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         Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

Phoebe Howard: Bedroom Views

Birdhouse view, below.

Thru the years about 30% of my clients have had views into the tree tops.
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Good fortune, indeed.  Hardly possible to 'fake' a tree top view from level ground & zero trees.
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If the chair, above, is the only seating in the room I would have Howard back to fix its direction !
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pic Phoebe Howard.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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                                                          Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

Hindsight Wisdom: 3 Things

With irony, and infertility, I bear witness, thanks to my career, to many successful mothers.  However, never an Oprah show topic, I bear witness to parent/child relationships displaying the blessings of infertility too. 

Successfully retired from a career/business she owned, involved now with volunteer work making a difference on the national stage, her 2 children are in their 30's.  I've always put her in my successful mom category.

Invited to dinner last nite she surprised me with 3 things she wish she'd known at the front end of her motherhood.

Talk to her children sooner about drugs.  For birthdays/Christmas do not give so many nice gifts.  When their father wants to discipline the children, let him, don't over ride his input on most occasions.

Clear-eyed candor.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Have lost count of the moms, when discovering my unwanted infertility, said they would walk thru fire for their children yet if they could do it all again they would not have them.  It's an odd thing to be on the sideline & bear witness.  My unborn children are perfect, don't you know !!  Alas, it's grandchildren I miss, not children.
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Pics taken at a jobsite.  Last pic, one of  my favorite designs.  Understatement, I'm incredibly proud of creating this view.  Simple & historic yet it's new and took me 3 decades of experience to get here.    Plus the skill of my team.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.

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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

Hotel Perfect Bedroom + Pretty Privacy

Aside from 'Hotel Perfect' design, below, the garden view drew my eye for its ubiquity in Atlanta.

Neighbors houses, tiny lot lines.  Yet wanting privacy.  Pretty privacy !
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Fence, understory trees, tall espalier shrubs.  Amazing the privacy, softness, warmth & beauty a few plantings provide.  And, keep it few.  Who wants to look at views full of garden chores to be done !
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In addition, from these doors, fragrances of akebia, tea olive, gardenia, daphne.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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pic BHG.  What is this style of decorating called?  Have done it in my own bedroom after le divorce, calm-serene-pretty.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.
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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

When a Garden Crosses the Line

Gardens begin inside your house.

Your garden is art on the wall.

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Gardens must be a backdrop to lives lived inside.  Beauty to enrich spirit, increase joy, diminish sadness.

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If you don't have this now, with your garden, you have a surprise awaiting.  This is what happens when your garden crosses the line, one of the best & most enduring friendships of your life.  Once you do have it, and see another with the same type of relationship, voila, a new friend.  

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pic Hen House.  

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.
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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

Ricky Lauren: The Hamptons: Food, Family, and History

   

Ricky Lauren the Hamptons Food, Family and History, is a good read for recipes, voyeurism into a sweet lifestyle & history of place.  

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A job in Alabama this year had me at Auburn University taking a government regulated landscape certification exam to legally put plants in the ground.  I took Lauren's book to mark recipes for any waiting room slowing my pace.  

More than recipes Ricky maps the decades of her marriage, raising children and stays at their various Hamptons homes.  She pulled me in.  You see my list from Alabama, below.  Ricky gives breakfast, picnic, lunch & dinner recipes.  Of course she had me at the picnics.  Redolent of the life changing picnics Jenny, my mother-in-law, created.

Fresh vegetables with angel pasta was the first recipe I cooked.  If you like Julia Child/James Beard you can taste their influence.  Ricky put her mark on it, in fewer steps + greater simplicity while leaving all the flavor.
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You know I passed the exam.  Alas, had to study for it, drive several hours, pay the exam fee, pay the licensing fee, pay the police ticket parking fee for parking where I was told to park, then discovered the license was only good for a few weeks.  Not even a year.  And that parking ticket?  Auburn was in the newspaper not long afterward for a parking ticket scam !
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Yet, I did get my Ricky Lauren list.  Go me.
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Chandelier, top pic, proves you cannot have Too-Much-Chandelier in the garden.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Top pic Harpers Bazaar.  Bottom pic my harvest table.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.
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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

Double Axis: Consider Both Directions

Outside, at the tiered fountain looking into the window, I wonder if the wreath is double sided.

Double Axis, if a view is pretty in 1 direction it must be pretty in the opposite direction.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pic Habitually Chic.

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.
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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.