Showing posts with label winter garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label winter garden. Show all posts

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Design For Winter Not Summer

Design for Summer & it's pretty in summer. Design for Winter & it's pretty all year.
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A new thread to that thought, design a summer garden to look like winter. Hmmmmm. In the heat/humidity/mosquito summer seeing a cooling garden of winter. Interesting.
Summer, above, Lake Maggiore, Italy. This qualifies.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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How do I know it's a summer pic? I took it.
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Epiphany came reading, "Ms. Malcolm's books have wintry atmospheres - both intellectual and aesthetic - that derive partly from the way she takes facts and attaches them, like someone hanging tea-light candles from high rafters, to mythology and classic literature, mostly Russian." "When a relative recalls, in the courtroom, the dead man eating a pomegranate, the Comp Lit student in Ms. Malcolm pounces. "Of course he was eating a pomegranate," she writes. "Characters in Russian literature are always eating (or offering) fruit at significant moments." Dwight Garner, New York Times, in his book review, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, by Janet Malcolm.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Landscape Design Zero Plants: Before & After


Landscapes take 3 + years to look good, on average. Most gardens get stuck in the '+'.
Unfinished, this garden is ready for showtime. Those pallets of stone, above, MAKE the garden, below. Ha, no plants, yet a garden is born. Why?

Landscape Design 'listens' to the site.
The biggest focal point in a garden? Your home. Vanishing Threshold.
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Consider: paint colors, light fixtures, shutters, doors, views into windows, turning windows into doors, getting rid of disgusting foundation plantings, pathways to move the eye + foot thru your garden, land stewardship, how to be in the garden for pleasure (tea-wine-canapes-luncheon-reading ipad-etc.), historical concepts of landscape design, thriftiness, no watering once established, no chemicals ever, no fertilizing once organically stabilized, groundcovers instead of mulch, succession planting, something coming into bloom throughout the year, canopy trees, understory trees, evergreen walls, & more.
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Consider all of the above & you won't wait 3 years, or 3 seconds, for a beautiful garden.
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Proof is in the pics above.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Look at the new frontdoor again. See what I did? Took out the transom, replaced with a taller door. Getting rid of that subdivisiony horrendous aspect, ca. 1970's, of windows/door at same height. Guess how we chose the color for the frontdoor? (Another post.)
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Eco Gardening is a SMALL concept. Vanishing Threshold is how I create a garden.
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(Puppet Barbuda has zero attitude, she's all PUPPET'ude !)

Monday, March 21, 2011

Vanishing Threshold: Lunch & Learn

Vanishing Threshold is an original concept, an epiphany while studying historic landscapes in Italy. Landscapes begin inside your home. Place focal points on axis with key views. It's that simple.
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An inner voice impels me to take Vanishing Threshold out of the garden realm. Are you an Interior Decorator? Landscape Designer? Come hear me speak about creating beautiful landscapes in Vanishing Threshold with your home.
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AmericasMart, Lunch & Learn: Looking for inspiration and education between Markets? Join Tara Dillard for a demonstration on successfully incorporating outdoor living spaces into your designs - March 24, noon-1pm, at AmericasMart. RSVP to 404-220-2055 or nlyle@americasmart.com.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pot on plinth, above, on axis from my living room. Centered on window. Interior decorators, are you looking out the windows of your clients home? Interiors are not finished unless the window views are part of a home's interior. My landscape designs are not complete unless views into windows are fabulous.
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Designer? What is original to you? What is your horse/pony show? Willing to get out of your comfort zone & let the world know?

Monday, March 14, 2011

This Garden & Its Mistress

Carriage house, fescue, boxwoods, pair of elms, stone wall/stone terrace/steps, below, all new, perhaps 12 minutes old in the pic.
Client is successful, headstrong, bold, smart, athletic, spiritual, demanding, puckish.
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Today she is in a hospital bed unable to move or speak.
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Before surgery she directed her brother to finish her landscape with us.
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My hope & prayer? In addition to complete recovery, I want to hear her ask: why those boxwoods are 6" off, why didn't you get bigger elms, why isn't the potager edged with dwarf boxwood, why aren't existing boxwoods-in-pots sited & etc.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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This story, this incredible woman, has dug itself in. She's in my prayers.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The Easiest Design Tool?

Contrasts. Contrast EVERYTHING in your landscape. Big leaves next to small leaves. Burgundy foliage next to green foliage. Spikey flowers next to round flowers. Square terrace with round urns at its entry.Contrasts on this new home are wicked good.
Curves, squares, arcs, circle, colors, wood, brick, glass, slopes, rectangles, peaks, valleys, flat, vertical.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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The next easy design tool? Repetition.
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Yes, a good book: Landscape Design: Contrasts & Repetition. (Now, finding time to write it!) Just when you get your contrasts correct it's time to repeat, repeat, repeat......... No worries, it took me a long time to latch on to these tools.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Why You Shouldn't Decorate With 'Cute'

"On the outskirts of agony sits some observant fellow who points." Virginia Woolf
When I NEED her words I don't need a cute stupid sign or focal point (cheap resin is particularly offensive, ha, expensive resin too) in the garden as I gaze out my windows.
I need beauty, strength & wisdom.
Upon a winter's day Providence laughs. Slowing me. Taking me away, for a few moments, into a realm of grace.
Away from the 'outskirts of agony' .
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Closer to seeing the 'fellow who points'.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics taken at Pecan Orchard's garden this month. Ugh, straining to see the 'fellow who points'. Knowing I will when I let go.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Nassim Taleb: 3 Views

From, The Bed of Procrustes, a new book by Nassim Taleb."Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous."
"You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional insult of having to become humble."
"You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept."
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Wesley Yang wrote about Taleb, "He made what he has called his "fuck you" money when his bets against the market made him millions on Black Monday in 1987." "...the content of his next book, Anti-Fragility, ...will be about how we can create systems that mimic the resiliency of nature."
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Taleb also wrote, The Black Swan, and, Fooled by Randomness. Both bestsellers. Both about Wall Street.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics taken this week, of my month old Conservatory, from my bedroom window. Poppets, you should see my VINTAGE 25 year old linoleum kitchen floor, with battle scars.
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Conservatories are for the soul, kitchen floors a necessity. Younger, I would have done the 'right' thing, the floor. This age is exquisite, bringing me the Conservatory.
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No doubt, fate will bring a new kitchen floor, including, of course, new countertops, backsplash, sink, faucet, stove, refrigerator. Last year in the kitchen was: ceiling reconfiguring, painting, 4 new chandeliers & cabinets. In the interim, I don't look down.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Do You Mentor?

On my tiny property, below, in a small working-class neighborhood I create myriad garden scenes in denial of time, budget, location. Along with a passion for Garden Design, Providence gave me mentors from the last of an era, the Stoics. Their mentoring comes with a hunger to pass it along. Barbara Allen mentored me. She died yesterday.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic taken with our last snow (Feb.?) from my bathroom window. See the street of houses? Ha, this is what good Garden Design does. Barbara is in every Garden Design I've done, and will do.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Underused Plants

Now that you've seen, Edgeworthia, below, how can you not have it? Winter blooms on deciduous stems. Grown as a shrub or small tree depending upon your pruning. Part shade to edge of woodland in the south, full sun to part shade in the north, zones: 5-9. . Pic

Lonicera fragrantissima, below, visually a bore, but once you smell her, you will have her. A gangly shrub, zones: 1-9, with arching canes, sun or shade, plenty of winter blooms to bring inside.
Witch Hazel, below, a small understory tree for shade to part sun. Blooms in winter. Foliage persists through much of winter, beige, boring until you see it dripping with rain/dew backlit by the morning sun. Upon that morning you will know why the universe was invented.
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Each are drought tolerant & essentially carefree. Oddly, I chose winter bloomers.
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More Underused Plants at the Garden Designers Roundtable today.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Discovered the pics via Garden Lust. Not entirely clear if they were from the New York Times or taken by Garden Lust.
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The Garden Designers Roundtable posts will be up after 1pm central.
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Wish everyone could have camellias and gardenias and tea olive & etc. Alas, narrow zones.
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Fantasy plant? Dwarf eleagnus, 2'-3'.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

The Queen's Pot

The best containers in your garden? So wonderful they can remain empty.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic taken in the Bay Terrace, my front yard, from the living room. When I saw a particularly fine empty pot at Glamis Castle, one of the Queen's homes, epiphany ! Some of my pots are fabulously empty and some are planted. Please, get yourself at least one Queen's Pot.
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Garden Designers Roundtable: Containers
More !! More !!! More !!!!

This month’s bloggers on the Gardeners Roundtable!

Christina Salwitz : Personal Garden Coach : Renton, WA

Debbie Roberts : A Garden of Possibilities : Stamford, CT

Jenny Petersen: J Petersen Garden Design : Austin TX

Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO

Laura Livengood Schaub : Interleafings : San Jose, CA

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In the Garden : Los Altos, CA

Rochelle Greayer : Studio “G” : Boston, MA

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK

Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT

Shirley Bovshow : Eden Makers : Los Angeles, CA
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Apologies, I can't get the links to go thru.....at the moment. All of the fabulous landscape designers, from many states & zones, above, are also writing about containers today at: Garden Designers Roundtable.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Stealing the View

View, below, from the Garden Room earlier this year. Same view, below, last week.
My tiny property lives large because I own the sky. How? Canopy & understory trees, walls of evergreens, floors of groundcovers/stone on axis from window views inside my home. Vanishing Threshold.
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And, Dahlings, this is big, I stole the view, above. Those aren't my trees. La-Ti-Da.
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Azalea 'George Tabor' is the pink flower you see. Soon blue mophead hydrangeas will be blooming. Later, rosy pink Sasanqua's will bloom.
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By December I'll have the 4 Seasons view from this window.
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(Tara's Trinity of the Southern Garden: Azalea, Hydrangea, Camellia. Plant my trinity and you won't go a day in the year without blooms. Included are oakleaf-Anna Belle-mophead-PG-Tardiva hydangeas & C. Japonica.)
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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23 years in my home & these are the first pics from this view. Why? Since January interiors have been painted, kitchen & master bath remodeled, furnishings redecorated. Odd, new interiors creating new views of the garden. Susanne Hudson was hired to choose colors. Ha, that flowed into other changes. Love everything she's done. Salient fact, I gave her free reign. Total control. A blessing to get out of my own way and let Susanne create magic.

Monday, March 22, 2010

A NEW GARDEN ROOM: ROSE TERRACE

ROSE TERRACE, unfinished & already a dowager, hosted me Saturday. Shirt sleeves, wine, book.

Incomplete, ha, the charms of ROSE TERRACE are prodigeous.

ROSE TERRACE is under the crape myrtles, below, and my office window.

ROSE TERRACE, below, last month. Delightful, the potency of shirt sleeves Saturday.


Of course, below, I was in the chaise, circa 1930, taking pic of the teak adirondack with fallen camellia blossoms, C. 'White By The Gate'.


Antique roses weave into crape myrtles shading house & ROSE TERRACE. That idea came in Claude Monet's garden, circa 1990. Couldn't get home fast enough to order the roses. Today's era? Order via cell phone from Claude's garden. "Claude', one of the dead men I have a THING for.
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Prior to being the ROSE TERRACE this was a hydrangea patch.
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Prior to being a hydrangea patch this was an herbaceous border.
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Prior to being an herbaceous border this was ---can't believe I'm admitting to this --- otto luyken laurels I planted before I knew a thing about gardening.

Hydrangeas repurposed, below, at the border of ROSE TERRACE. Shot pea gravel, 3" deep -- no landscape fabric, with stone & brick for edging.
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New Camellias, Tea Olives & Gardenias are espaliered against the wall of ROSE TERRACE.
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Lanterns + Candles await to be hung from the Crape Myrtles.
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Terra cotta pots await my luncheon appointment with a topiary wholesale nursery next week. Honestly, it would be impossible to make this stuff up. AND it's work. My career.
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(Of course no one wants my job when it's hot/humid & blood is trickling down my neck from mosquito bites or I'm picking up dog s---t in a client's garden so they'll only see my contractor's beautiful installation of my design. Oh, lest I forget, falling off the second story of my home before a winter open garden & getting up and working more while it's still dark outside so the 10am start time is EFFORTLESS. Ha!!!!!!!!!)


Dowager? Incomplete, ROSE TERRACE is already gorgeous & functioning.
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NOTE: Adirondack on flagstones, prevents irratic sinking. For proper photography & when guests are present hide flagstones under shot pea gravel.
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Inspiration? Enjoying wine/canapes at a girlfriend's, realizing I didn't have a similar spot.
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Can't wait for warmer days ahead, girlfriends & ROSE TERRACE.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Thursday, March 18, 2010

TAKE JOY

Rosemary Verey wrote of removing foliage off winter blooming Lenten Rose. I copied, below. In Sir Walter Scott's garden I saw a 'well placed chair'. I copied, below.
Pamela Harper wrote of every garden needing a tall cone shape taking the eyes to the sky. I copied, below.
Joy is always present. Always.
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Take.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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"Take joy" was a favorite of Tasha Tudor, from the book, Tasha Tudor's Garden, pics by Richard W. Brown & text by Tovah Martin. Don't have this book yet? Take joy, buy it.
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Stephen Holden recently reviewed, "Gershwin...Here to Stay", performing at the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, for the NYTimes. In it he wrote, "When Gershwin's friend Kay Swift observed him playing "dark, doom-laden chords" and asked him what he was composing, he said: "Oh, nothing. I was just working off some of the dreary music that lies near the top of a composer's mind. Then I"ll dig down to the happiness stuff, with any luck."

Monday, March 15, 2010

USE WHAT YOU HAVE

View, below, of Elizabeth Clarkson's living room from her foyer. Seating, below, rims the walls of her foyer.
Unseen, below, unless standing at an awkward angle.

Did Elizabeth find these chimney flue liners? Probably.
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In garden & home Elizabeth came from a generation knowing, "It's what you do with what you have."
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Elizabeth Clarkson left her home & garden as a public resource, Wing Haven, in Charlotte, NC. Elizabeth Lawrence's home & garden, a few houses down, is now owned by Wing Haven. Go.
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Took the pics last month.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

FORMAL + PSO

Deep winter dormant, I still know what this garden looks like. And why it works.
Formal hardscape: hedges & lines contrasted with chaos of plantings + informal tree trunks.
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Italians have cone shaped shrubs, with scruffy PSO's, behind evergreen hedges. (My favorite!)
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French gardens are quite rigid with evergreen hedging enclosing, oh let's say, tulips.
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Ah, the English. Evergreen hedges exploding with herbaceous borders & flowering shrubs.
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Take this style, evergreen hedge +lines + backfill plantings. Make it your own.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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PSO? Plant Shape Only!! Yes, more pics I took recently at Wing Haven.
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My garden began as mostly English. Now, it's Italian + English.

Friday, March 5, 2010

SMALL CONTENTMENTS

Wallpaper, 24 years old & still adored.The urge, energy & creativity to bring flowers inside, below, was absent for years. Blooms outside these windows every day, all year, no effort. Of course I must tolerate birds, butterflies or honeybees everyday too. Camellias, blooming outside, below. The brown? Dormant hydrangeas. The green? Azaleas. (Tara's Trinity of the Southern Garden: Azaleas, Camellias & Hydrangeas.)
Old wicker from an estate sale around the corner 3 years ago.

The cloche had been in the garden over 5 years, until hellebores were cut last week.

After 20 years, my house was painted. A decorator, Susanne Hudson, hired to help with colors & interior design.
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I'm basking in the joy, serenity & energy my new spaces are giving me.
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Above, When stamens drop, I'm taken out of time. (Lucky me, I think some people need cocaine to feel like this. As the Sea Witch in Little Mermaid says, "...Poor unfortunate souls........")
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What mentors have shared with me the most? Small contentments.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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That fabulous cloche? TJMaxx, $9.99!

Monday, March 1, 2010

SPRING IS EASY

This garden, below, gets it right. How do you know?
The bones (evergreen structure, axis, focal point, hardscape) hold together in deepest winter, above.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Top pic from Wing Haven. Bottom pic I took last week at Wing Haven, Charlotte, NC.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

THE GARDEN IN WINTER

Design your landscape for winter & it will be pretty all year. Design for May & you're apt to have only May be beautiful. Peonies, foxglove, clematis, roses, hydrangea, verbena are fabulous but they don't pay the rent.
2 weeks ago, above, in my sweet little garden. A sideyard exposed to a cul de sac of neighbors.
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A reality I've chosen to obliterate. A tiny garden rich in garden rooms. Yet it lives big.
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Why? Look closely at the top pic. I own the sky.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Thursday, February 18, 2010

HUMBLED

Until I walked my garden for snow pics, below, who knew the witchazel was blooming?
Daphne buds, below, fat. Snow/ice, no problem, they always open in fragrant perfection.

Providence laughs in gardens.
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Designing fabulous landscapes is all about letting Providence laugh.
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HOW? Use plants for your area & plan for something new to begin bloom every 2 weeks. It's the backdoor to birds, butterflies & more. Without effort.
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You'll discover your garden is a hobbit hole of grace & atonement.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Isn't atonement a great word? At one with. In my garden, sometimes, I'm in atonement with nature, time, loved ones & friends & pets who are gone, problems I can't solve, joy, beauty, new ideas, a good book, acceptance, not forcing solutions, placing hope in God's hands, the richness of solitude, forgiveness, meandering thoughts, discarding old ideas no longer serving my life, & mostly, the grace I seek.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

DOUBLE AXIS

Looking east, below. Looking west, below.
Double axis with an Italian cypress.
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My wicked invention after an epiphany in mentor/friend Margaret Moseley's garden.
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A focal point fabulous in one direction must be fabulous in the opposite direction.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Don't despair dahlings, it takes years to get to double axis. Start with your single axis & the double will come. Example: Place bench on view from your bedroom window. Sitting on the bench you see the air-conditioner? NOT ALLOWED. Ha, put your intellect to it and create a fabulous view from the bench.
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Pics taken last Friday.