7 Steps to a Beautiful Easy Landscape

Why, really, have a Garden?

"...understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness."




"...a mistake for which you alone will pay."


Pic, The Sunday porch:enclos*ure, Delray FL 2, 1959, Library of Congress

"Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue."



Found on vestidoslindosatelier.tumblr.com
"You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else."


Found on decoestilo12.blogspot.com
"Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room."
Found on cotedetexas.blogspot.com
"The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming."

Pic via, The Little Hermitage.
.Topics, above, your garden will answer, absolve, comfort.  From, 

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar — Cheryl Strayed.

"Tiny Beautiful Things will endure as a piece of literary art,” Almond writes, “as will Cheryl’s other books (Torch and Wild), because they do the essential work of literary art: they make us more human than we were before.”

“But it’s a memoir with an agenda,” Steve Almond writes, “With great patience, and eloquence, (Sugar) assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.”

"Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. … Life isn’t some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters— every sin, every regret, every affliction."

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In a Garden, there is rescue.  How many decades, now, have I known to frame a life question/event, head into my Garden, let the question go, and come away with calm, and answers?  In my Garden, more often, free ranging thoughts arrive, unbidden, life's action steps.  "How did you know to do that?", "Well, I was in my Garden."
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If the essential work of literary art is to make us more human than we were before, Gardens are a book.  Gardening, in popular culture,  is a shovel, shredded car tire mulch dyed a redwood hue, mowing, swapping annuals 2 seasons/year, pouring chemicals.  In those gardens, who can hear?  In those gardens, chaos is fed.
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Curated these pics for you, I know each Garden is taking you in, welcoming, calming, inspiring, lightening the load.  A Garden Design course could be made from these few pictures.  Every topic a Garden imbues, is shot above.
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Have you already realized, in these pics, a Garden's mission statement & your 7 steps?
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7 Steps to a Beautiful Easy Landscape:
* A place to nap.
* A place to live your life between house/garden.  Terrace, deck, veranda...
* Framed views from inside your home, into the garden.  Vanishing threshold.
* Pockets of pure Nature, rusticities.
* Furniture in the Garden.  A place to share dinner/lunch with family/friends.
* Choose a Garden color trinity.  Green/brown/white is the classic, a proven friend.
* Interior style must flow into your exterior style.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Over lunch, in my Garden, in the Conservatory, I have heard stories, no woman shares, unless she's in a Garden confessional.  Great laughter, loud laughter, much laughter, mostly laughter and tears too.  The confessional safe, all have shared, exposed themselves.  Leaving the Conservatory is leaving the events of the stories lighter, yet the spent laughter grows heavier in joy as time passes.
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Thank you Farnum Street for inspiring today's post.

How to Transpose Interior Style Into Your Landscape

Designing a garden, I must go inside your home.  I need to see how you live in the home and which garden views, from inside, are the most important.  Your color choices are important, from, sofa, wallpaper, paint, art, accent pieces.
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Another element is how furniture is arranged in the living room, dining room, and breakfast room.  Those arrangements I often copy exactly for furniture groupings outside, in your garden.  Style choices for the garden furniture too.  Your interiors/exteriors must flow.


pic via The Garden Home.


 
Pic via Pinterest, here.

Arranging plantings in your garden, I often copy a few groupings, below, from table top, chest top, mantle top.  Transposing a pair of lamps into a pair of understory trees, pair of plates into a pair of plant drifts, pretty bowl at the center, below, could easily be the focal point bench/urn, you get the idea.



Pic via The Garden Home.


Pic from Pinterest, here.

Garden, above, could be pulled from a mantle with a pair of vases, a lovely bowl in the center, and a nice painting on the wall.  See it?
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How you design your table tops inside your home says a lot about how your brain works symmetrical/asymmetrical etc.  And I know you'll like the same styling outside.
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Quite fun, it never pales, when a client will say, "Oh, I love that.", then I reply, "I simply copied that chest top you have in the dining room.", "OMG, you did."
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Subtle & sublime.
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No one taught me to do these things, I just knew to do them.
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My grandmother, Laura, was a great piano player, by ear.  Little access to sheet music, she was known to play the newspaper or magazines.  Transposing written words into notes.  I like to think I've transposed her piano playing into my garden design methodology !
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Now, look around your home with new eyes, and take it outside into the garden.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

How to Take Charge of Your Landscape

How to create your landscape?  Do you have a vision of it in your head?  You've begun.  First visions are mostly quaintly wrong, with a sweetness of effort, childlike in obvious desire, with no awareness of the complexities, across myriad layers, yet within, your deepest soul knows what is good, and can create a beautiful landscape, once it informs the brain, "unlearn your assumptions."
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Describing myself, above.
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What happened?  Went back to college for a horticulture degree, still not learning how to design pretty gardens, instead 'the-machine' taught how to design residential gardens with every layer, lawn-shrubs-annuals-fertilizers-chemicals, saturated in the hype they must be tended by a man in a truck arriving weekly, and you pay him monthly.  Landscape as commodity, Nature removed.
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Decades later, after studying beautiful historic gardens across Europe, the patterns/templates/math/simplicities of beautiful good gardens, surfaced, and spoke.  With pride, I can say, no garden I design is original they've all been done before, and proven themselves across centuries, and cultures.  More than working with the owners of gardens, long dead, and their garden designers, I know I am working with their muse.  Landscape design is not voodoo or 'feelings' it is a path of science, elevated into art.  Simplicities strung together.
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Then, a big event, teaching me, after years of delighting within gorgeous landscapes, they are merely sparkly ephemerals, pure amusement.   Beloved gave me 8 heirloom chics, less than a week old, for my birthday, along with a custom built Chinoiserie coop/run.  Once they were large enough they were taken from their garage kennel and put into their coop in my lovely mature garden.  Walking away, that first time, a new awareness made me stop and look at my garden with fresh eyes.  A new concern, the chicks.  I had to keep them alive, healthy, happy.  Stewardship.  Yet it was hardly one sided.  The chicks, aside from eggs, give pleasure in their antics, sounds, even how they walk, yet more.  Somehow, they work in stewardship of me, greater than I for them.  Finally, Nature's circle.  Took me a few decades, but I connected the dots.  G*d almighty first planted a garden.  Men come to build sooner than to garden finely as if gardening were the greater art..... for sure.    
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Metaphors of the bible are writ large tending livestock.  Who knew?  Rare I'm in the chicken coop and they don't make me laugh.  Hen pecked, pecking order, the cliches roll deeper, but chickens aren't my topic, will stop here with the chics.  Getting back to simplicities.  
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Gardens are designed in order of garden math.  An equation, Trees + paths/lawn/meadow/hardscape + focal points + shrubs + perennials/herbs/groundcovers = Beautiful easy landscape.  Trees/large shrubs, especially, must be placed to reduce HVAC expenses.  Include blooms/berries/fall color to cover entire year, add mystery & delight.  Gardens are installed in this order too.  Contrast every element, big leaves next to small leaves, rustic/formal, etc.   Create garden rooms, start your garden design from inside, looking into your garden.  Know how to break the rules of the garden design equation.  Don't choose plants you love/adore, choose plants that love/adore the site.  Your home is involved too, paint colors, lighting, views into windows, style of interior/exterior furnishings must flow.  There you have it, every garden design simplicity.
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The genius involved is trusting the simplicities and ignoring the genius-of-the-lizard-brain.



A client's farm gave the opportunity to site a barn into a similar setting, below.  And, guess what we did?  The view remains the same, no barn in view.  We created mystery, and delight sighting the barn into its own world, ever so close to the pristine pasture.



Via Pentreath-Hall, above.

Can you 'read' the perennial garden below?  Total formulaic, in use for centuries.  Perennials backdropped with large shrubs, and low meadow/lawn in front, contrasting flower shapes spikey/round, and the obligatory focal point urn/sundial/bench.
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About a decade ago I stopped doing so many perennials, using flowering shrubs instead.  Why?  Deer, drought/flood, dead-heading, dividing, down time.  Perennials seemed gorgeous, but not able to pay their rent.  Want to enjoy your garden, keep it low maintenance?  Shrubs instead of perennials, mostly.




Pic by Clive Nichols, above.

Poems are an intensification of reality, hence, good landscapes are poems.  There was a lovely poem in Women's Voices for Change recently, I know nothing about writing poems or poetry, including this wonderful description, of a poem, below.  Really, iambic pentameter, hexameter, traditional sonnet meters, the poem turns like a sonnet, proportionately correspondent, patterned end rhyme, and more, just really?  How I would love to have a long leisurely lunch in a cafe garden with a real poet. Paper/pen at hand.  Connecting the formation of a poem into its parallel of a garden.  Might as well invite a musician to that lunch, poems & gardens are songs too.  Would want the chef at table in conversation with us good landscapes are a recipe.....you get the idea.

From, Women's Voices for Change, below.

Although this poem is written in modern free verse, my (admittedly sensitive) sonnet-radar detects in it a ghost of that centuries-old form. To begin with, anytime a poem is close to 14 lines (this one is 16), I have to wonder. Although “Kanpur” is not strictly metered, I found myself able to scan the first ten lines as iambic pentameter and the last six as hexameter, both traditional sonnet meters. More compellingly, the poem turns in the same places I’d expect a sonnet to turn. Lines 10 and 11 (proportionately correspondent with the 8^th or 9^th lines where voltas reside in Petrarchan sonnets) express a turn in consciousness, a shocked recognition that events once deemed “trivial” actually have “vast importance.” The poem’s last two lines (analogous to a Shakespearian sonnet’s closing couplet) contain an actual, physical turn in the phrase describing how Leo “turned on us.”  Finally, the poem does make very subtle use of the patterned end-rhyme conventionally seen in sonnets. Lines 1, 6, 11, and 14 terminate in near-rhymes (late/not/night/out), with exactly five lines between the second and third instances and three lines between the third and last instance. The end word “night” gains resonance from another near-rhyme in that line, “late” in “late at night.” A second series of end rhyme occurs in lines 13 and 16, concluding with “know” and “Leo,” respectively. Moreover, as in line 11, line 16 saturates and intensifies its end-rhyme with a proximate internal rhyme: “Leo was the first to go. It began with Leo.” How fascinating—and devastating—that the sound emphasized here at the end of the poem is the archetypal human utterance of shock and grief: “O.”

The poem describes an event that is a turning point in the larger journey, the moment when things begin to fall apart, and this function is supported by its placement almost exactly in the middle (34^th of 63 poems) in the book. As such, it performs a dramatic function in the larger text. Is this function also reflected in the poem’s genre or mode? I see it as predominantly narrative, with the speaker looking back and telling a story about an event in his or her past, but with lyrical (those sound repetitions) and dramatic elements (the foreshadowing and suspense that close the poem). In the end, “Kanpur” defies characterization as lyric, narrative, or dramatic and reminds us that when done well, the blending of poetic genres can produce an amalgam of story, music, and tension as compelling as any work of fiction, and I admire the poem for the way it makes me want to read on, to keep turning the pages of the book, SERIES / INDIA."

Pic, above, by Clive Nichols

Formal meeting rustic, above.  Mystery.  I want to see the house belonging to this gate, and investigate its meadows/woods.  Delight.

"The game is just to copy things, no more."
— Matt Ridley in Mendel's Demon

First rule of landscape design, copy.  I thought this rule, horrible, because my garden designs must be original.  Glad I got over myself and 'original'.  Here's the thing about copying, no 2 sites are the same, hence you get original each time you copy.  

Pic, above, by Clive Nichols.

Create garden rooms, above.  Welcome, come in.  

Have a talk with your future landscape.  Seriously.  Frame the negotiation, below.  Time, money are constraints to each landscape, lose this excuse, everyone has it.  How can you overcome lack of time/money?  Frame the negotiation.  You are the deal maker, and your landscape is making a deal with you in return.  What do you each bring to the table?  Zero difference here between designing a garden or making a business deal.  

From the Harvard Business Review, below.

Control the Negotiation Before It Begins

by Deepak Malhotra

"...the costliest mistakes take place before negotiators even sit down to discuss the substance of the deal. That’s because people fall prey to a seemingly reasonable—but ultimately faulty—assumption about deal making. Negotiators often take it for granted that if they bring a lot of value to the table and have sufficient leverage, they’ll be able to strike a great deal. While those things are certainly important, many other factors influence where each party ends up."

Pic, above, Clive Nichols.

At the start I thought landscapes were about plants.  Partially, landscapes are about plants.  Landscapes are about you living your life.  Focal points, pots, furnishings, above, are part of the landscape.  Beauty is a landscape component, so is comfort.  And entertaining friends, with ease.

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I've never had a client who couldn't tell me exactly what they want in their garden. Though they could not tell themselves.  Does this make sense?  All my clients/students understand the language of a beautiful easy landscape, yet cannot speak it.  Why?  Mostly, the lizard brain. They've turned from listening to their heart and listened to the lizard brain mentioning a landscape needing significant upfront expense plus a man in a truck coming each week.  What kind of thinker are you?  Keep the lizard brain in check, let the knowledge of your heart speak and be heard.     

COLLABORATION

What Kind of Thinker Are You?

• Mark Bonchek and 
• Elisa Steele

For example, on the big picture or macro orientation:

• Explorer thinking is about generating creative ideas.
• Planner thinking is about designing effective systems.
• Energizer thinking is about mobilizing people into action.
• Connector thinking is about building and strengthening relationships.

Across the micro or detail orientation:

• Expert thinking is about achieving objectivity and insight.
• Optimizer thinking is about improving productivity and efficiency.
• Producer thinking is about achieving completion and momentum.
• Coach thinking is about cultivating people and potential.

Pic, above, Clive Nichols.

Loving a meadow mowed at different heights, above, has been a chief pleasure.  Decades later I discovered having this type meadow in landscapes increases pollinator habitat, increasing crop/fruit tree yields, healthier livestock.  More, I discovered, having trees, meadows & garden rooms combined, or this could be said as 'high density/low density', are maximum pollinator habitat.  Then chickens arrived, and I learned Nature had been using me in her methodologies all along. The ultimate bit of humor, I have been no greater, or less, than a bee, or possum, going about their lives, part of the bigger picture of Nature.  When Nature is healthy, we are.     

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls your success.

Thomas Edison

Pic, above, Clive Nichols.

Clive Nichols photography has been used with intent in this post.  Aside from his skills with the camera, he chooses the best gardens to use those skills.  Rusticities of the foreground, above, contrast perfectly with the formal stone folly focal point.  Low meadow encircled with trees/shrubs, maximum pollinator habitat of high density/low density.

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How to take charge of your landscape?  Copy.  Use the best ideas proven over centuries.  Use plants loving your zone/micro climate not plants you love.  Choose plants deer resistant and needing little water and zero chemicals.  Follow the Landscape Design Equation, above, and install in that order too.  After copying, repetition is a potent tool.  Choose a minimal team of plants, repeat, repeat, repeat.  Include your home in the plan, its paint colors, light fixtures, views into windows, hardware, interior furnishings style & colors.

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And, if you're planting bulbs or annuals, the rule is this, If you can count the number of flowers you do not have enough.

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I've taught a 4 week class for decades at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, all of the above, and more, are in those 4 weeks, slide shows included.  Taught horticulture at the local college for years too. 

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Nothing about taking charge of your landscape is difficult.  Nothing.  It's merely an assimilation of all the right things.

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Now, with the, above, you have the macro tools needed to take charge of your landscape.  

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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

Tweaking a Good Garden

Ernest Hemingway, "Never mistake motion for action."
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If you're working in your garden, and it's easy, you're probably doing it wrong.  Looking back at the early years of gardening, in my 20's, what would I tell that girl?  Most of gardening is counterintuitive.  Copy historic gardens from Europe.  Choose the simplest solution.  Keep your love affair with plants last on the priority list, top your plant list with those-great-bores performing against, drought, flood, deer, disease, insects, with little maintenance.  Do not design your garden from the street, stand inside your house, look out the windows, and begin designing the garden.
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Question pretty garden pictures, are they supporting the house, property values, Nature, and lives of those in the home?
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Pretty garden/home, above.  But.  If the sidewalk/street is at the front, move the hedge forward along the sidewalk/street, replace a central part of the turf with more paving, turn a couple of those windows into doors, and create a courtyard, espalier a flowering evergreen woody shrub against the solid wall for instant lush with little maintenance, choose comfortable seating, and small tables at the chairs for easy outdoor dining, and......
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Past my 20's I cannot look at garden pics without the brain overlay.  Better, it's not personal, the ideas are all historic, done for centuries.
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How many other ways to historically change this sweet garden, above?
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Many.
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This is my idea for a garden show, have 10 entries do the same project.  Would be happy to do all 10 myself.  That would be fun, challenging myself, making each one sublime.  But I would still want to see how 10 other people would do it.  Am selfish that way, always wanting to see more, learn more.  Always.
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How would you change this garden, above?
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Pic from here.  I have a Pinterest board, Changes, filled with good gardens I would like to tweak.

Thanksgiving Day in Stewardship

A year before buying our American Farmhouse, ca. 1900, we put an offer on another farm.

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Tiny house, small barn, a bit of woodland, and pastures.  Pastures were dominate, strong enough to make me look up the derivation.  Depth of description was surprising to she-who-had-always-lived-in-subdivisions.  Pasture, in the archaic form, Food & Nourishment.

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Epiphany taken, that moment, in the 7" thick Websters Dictionary.

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Pastures are not empty land.

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Pastures are the gift of sustenance from Providence.

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Empty?

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Crops, livestock, and more.

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As local bumper stickers proclaim, No Farms No Food.

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This could go in a lot of directions.

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Delicious, yes?

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Direction on this Thanksgiving Day, turkey ironstone, below.

How did I miss the heart-on-their-sleeve message?  Turkey plates, platters, bowls, kitsch, right?
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Before almost purchasing Pasture Farm, I had named it, I had the good fortune to work amongst heirloom turkeys, below.  From virgin pasture, below, I had been asked to design/build a 'historic' walled orchard.  It was my orchard to site, size, integrate into 100's of acres, with historic home & barns.  Game on.
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Back to the heirloom turkeys.  While designing the new 'historic' orchard on site, sitting in my folding chair, drawing on the folding table, heirloom turkeys looked me straight in the eye and meandered all around.  First takeaway from heirloom turkeys is their stunning color package.  As if Monet had spring time fun after lunch with good wine, and new tubes of bright paints.  Next, were their feathers.  Rather, what they did with every feather upon their bodies.  Their feathers would ruffle outward concavely, almost 1/2" space between each, and vibrate.  Vibrations intense, creating a sound amongst their feathers.  Of course I was charmed.  By heirloom turkeys!  I also knew those turkeys were meant for several Thanksgiving Day tables.  

As much as I enjoy seeing the historic orchard, now built, above, I enjoyed those hours, working amongst the heirloom turkeys in a pasture, as a life delight.

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I got the memo, Providence sustains us, gives us all we need, but we must take it.

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Taking it, our gift from Providence, isn't work, it's pleasure.

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The turkey dishes are not kitsch.

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Turkey dishes are a prayer of thanksgiving.

Before any epiphanies about pastures & turkey dishes, I had purchased this platter, below, for a song.
Thought it was amusing, and would be fun on the Thanksgiving Day table.
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Life is rich, it is I, now, in thanksgiving to Providence, for all provided, and what the turkey dishes have been saying since their own inception.  Whether I understood or not.  The old patterns of turkey dishes are the bible, in pictorial form.  Taking from pastures we can build a home from strong woods lasting centuries, put food on the table, weave cloth to wear, understand the stories about people in the bible, and absorb onto our skin biome/intestinal biome, organisms separate from us, but without which, we die.
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God almighty first created a garden.  Indeed.

Before the bible was written, it was planted, on the Pasture of Earth.

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Today's turkey & dressing will be served on my platter.  

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Living generations off farm land, it is normal to grow up thinking industrialized farming is normal and those who do the farming, menial.  Grocery stores are expected to be overstuffed with delights from across the globe, all seasons, rain/shine.

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Getting heirloom chickens, first livestock of my life, almost 4 years ago, I went from amusement in my garden and gardening, into stewardship.

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Stewardship, depth/breadth beyond measure, compared to amusement. 

Eating out recently, this painting, above, was in the foyer.

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Not just a goat.

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A goat looking at me, saying, "Be a good steward to livestock & Earth, it is the only way you will survive."

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Amusement vs. Stewardship

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Top pic, Martha Stewart, from here slideshow, here.  2nd pic from jobsite, 3rd/4th pics from my pantry.

Curated Not Collected

Sourcing focal points/pots/furnishings for your garden, before any item comes home, ask yourself, "Is this piece so wonderful it will be fought over at my estate sale?"
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Paying attention to the best gardens several observations resonate.  Alas, the most important, don't.
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The best landscapes have multiple narratives of curating.
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Lack of curating creates a common theme amongst new landscapes, hodge-podge-lodge.

Moving from my 30 year cottage garden into a historic American Farmhouse taught me more about curating.  Several layers of curating are site specific, other layers travel well.  Wish I had known this before moving.  2 massive truckloads to Goodwill later, I've earned a new expertise.
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Last weekend I was able to further curate garden accessories on their 12+ pallets.   
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Head Collection, below, made the transition, along with terra cotta.  Still looking for St. Francis' head, he started the collection.



Clusters of vintage watering cans, below, made the narrative move.  Hopefully the huge chandelier, below, will find the perfect arbor or oak/pecan tree branch.
 

Cat collection, below, made the move.  Laura, below, was conceived/born in my Cottage Garden. and loves the move.  Enjoy watching her create routines. 

Next best focal point rule, after the one at top, one focal point per area.

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How do the heads & cats fit into 'one focal point per area' ?

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Subsidiary focal points.  Not main focal points they are tucked within foliage, only seen by the observant.  

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How many people toured my small Cottage Garden & never saw the head/cat collections?  Many.

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Those narratives, curated.

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Collections can overwhelm, if you are there, with too much stuff, lucky you, a new brainwave, curate.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pics taken this weekend.  

Best Garden Tools: Garden Apron

Beginning the 2nd professional nursery job, of my life, in my 20's, this time propagation was involved too, I was given an apron.  To wear.  Oh my.  As if punching a time clock, with a college degree, weren't enough, I had to wear an apron too?  Honestly, dad died without ever knowing these 2 facts about my career, which was not a career to him but an embarrassment wrapped in shame.


Pic, above, www.BowlandPitcher.com

During those 2.5 years of nursery/propagation work, wearing an apron, I was in bed most nights by 9pm.  Tired, but happy.  The work was exhausting, leaving little time, or strength, for working in my own garden.



Pic, above, from www.Frabrics-Store.com

The happy day of resigning arrived, bingo, full-time self-employed designing gardens.  And, energy abounded to put into my own garden.



Pic, above, www.MagnoliaPearl.com

About 2 hours into working my own garden, after leaving the nursery, something was wrong.  Work was not flowing, easily.  Too many little trips trodding a path to get something.  And, this was before cell phones.



Pic, above, via, The Hearty Home, and with a tutorial to make the apron.

Aside from the obvious about propagation, and learning how to work 4 different types of professional greenhouses, I had learned how to work, wearing an apron.  That foe, the apron.  Epiphany taken, G*d does have a sense of humor, the apron was full circle back in my life.
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Needs for MY garden apron.  Tough fabric yet lightweight for summer heat/humidity, hold cell phone, Felcos, weeds, trash, a treat for the chics, etc.  All my aprons have been worn at the waist, until now.
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Moving to our small homestead has changed the type of apron needed.  Need something more functional than a waist apron & don't want to tie strings.  Done with that.
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On the hunt for the apron, above.  It seems most functional.  The entire apron 'thing' is still amusing, to me, decades later.  Wish dad had lived longer to get the epiphany about my gardening.  Going thru paperwork after he died I found his Air Force discharge papers from his test pilot days.  He only had 1 other completed course, aside from test piloting, psychological warfare training.  That made me smile!  My gardening, professionally, about did him in.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Two best garden tools?  Felco pruners & my apron.

Fencing: Contrast Formal + Rustic

Garden Design uses contrast as a potent tool.  If I could only have 5 arrows in my quiver, contrast is one of the 5.
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Contrast, everything.
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Fine country estate?  Rustic fence, below.
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Why?  More layers of narrative.  More metaphor.  A deeper story.  Intellect playing in grace.



Rustic fences, below, with fine manor houses?  Centuries of examples.



Charming, below, welcoming.  Formal fence, below, instead?  Fine.  But you've just created a 'walk-thru', get where you are going don't stop statement.



Elegant roses, rustic fence, below, is wicked.  I smell the fragrance.



Rustic, yet looks formal, below.



Rustic, reading formal, below, with the black stain.



Formal, reading rustic, below, with hog panel wire.




A little privacy, below, historic lattice.  

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Beloved & I are building a deck at the back of our American Farmhouse.  We chose the formal reading rustic with hog panels.  We didn't want to block views of  softly rolling hills/open-wooded/lake/sunsets, yet needed a hint of elegance to bind to the house, while honoring the simple livestock barbed wire fence along a property line with dairy cows.  Contrast.  Need 1 panel of the lattice, above, with our railing.
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All day yesterday we were building the new deck, just the 2 of us.  At our age.  Go us.  Late in the daylight, a ribbon of black birds flew over, the ribbon must have been a mile long, and they were all talking.  Haven't seen/heard anything like it since childhood.  Sunset was a stunner.  Having lived in subdivisions my entire life, without seeing sunrises/sunsets I'm easily distracted by a good sunset.  Hints of the Milky Way too.  More days ahead, working on the deck around the day job.  Soon we must decide roofing for portions of the deck and screened room.  Hard choices, not wanting to block sky views, yet getting protection from summer sun, and mosquitoes.
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All pics linked from my Fences Pinterest Board.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Made the choice to build ourselves, and save $5,000+.  Beloved already had the know-how & tools.  Huge.

American Farmhouse: How to Live on a Small Farmstead

At the front end of gardening in Georgia, newly graduated from SMU into Jimmy Carter's 21% interest rates and few jobs, I lived above a 3 car carriage house.  Built in the late teens of the last century, red brick, wood floors, high ceilings, 3 dormer windows, 2 bedrooms/1 bath, living room, kitchen/dining, and a huge deck in back, high on posts, overlooking 50 rolling, open/wooded acres, behind dense woods an east/west train track, unseen but not unheard, bordered the back property line, with 3 horses, my favorite, Dan, a dignified Tennessee Walker who reminded me of Cary Grant, if he were a horse in late life.
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After a year in the carriage house, Miss Louise died, and we moved into the Big House, a red brick/white trim Williamsburg, 5/4 and a door, circular drives at the front and back.  Elegant proportions & details, though not large, oak floors aged the color of north Georgia sourwood honey, and a garden evolved over decades into blooms everyday of the year spread amongst, azaleas, hydrangeas, camellias, roses, mahonia, gardenia, iris, lilac, lily of the valley, forsythia, daffodils, cherry trees, magnolias, viburnums, sweet shrub, red bud, and more.
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Almost 2 years later I built my starter home, tiny lot, less than a quarter acre, in a new cluster home subdivision.  
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There I learned to garden.  Added another degree, Horticulture, & more importantly, 2+ decades of travel across Europe studying historic landscapes.
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A few weeks ago, I moved from my starter home to the country, time lapse 33 years.
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Now, with Beloved, I'm in a white clapboard American Farmhouse, ca. 1900, wide chipping gray painted concrete steps, framed on one side with a plumbing pipe handrail, step on to a wide/deep front porch, and finally you're at the front door, original to the house, its brass bell, with a turn of the latch, still rings loud at 115 years old, 11' high beadboard ceilings, a central hall 9' x 50', heart of pine wood floors, 4.5 rolling acres, open/wooded, pond, historically sited with house close to the road and property line, century old pecan trees lining the street/sidewalk, leaving space for orchard, potager, pleasure garden, livestock, barn, sheds, drives, and views of the trailing Piedmont before it turns to Coastal plane, dotted with neighbor's dairy cattle.  Many views pure Thomas Cole, 1801-1848, founder of the Hudson River School painting style.
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A homestead garden.  Horticulture joined with agriculture.  A garden never meant for amusement, instead, stewardship.      
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It's not uncommon to reach 100f in summer, nor a cow to jump a fence into the garden, deer/fox/coyote ubiquitous, myriad ant species continually on the march, flying insects further evolved than their city counterparts, timber rattlers and happily king snakes too.  But I have gotten ahead of my story.  There are no pleasure gardens, potager, paths, barn, orchard, chicken coop, focal points on axis, potting shed.  Yet.  And the pond, rimmed with trees & an earthen damn threatening breach has not been touched in decades.  Exciting times.
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Cannot imagine a more perfect proscenium.  The play, ours to write, build, and live.
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Time, land, house, weather, the project list, day job, and division of labor between the sexes are dominate.  No pretending I have control over time, weather, or the rest of the list.  Lifestyle choices honed in the city aren't useful here.  This house, and property, have it right about life, I've moved into my beliefs.  Wendell Berry made this choice years ago.  Without awareness, choosing to live in this house and on this property was the action step of Joseph Campbell's, Follow your bliss, and Jung's, Our lives are about getting the outside to match the inside.
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By now, gravel drives, paths, parking courts, barn, wrap around porch at the back of the house, sheds moved, chicken coup built, interior painted, front porch stained, were all to have been completed and plantings ready to be resourced from growers.  Instead, it's a list, and the house/property are in charge.  During this, I'm realizing, is a rich life.  No more fighting city instincts, the choice is made, stay in the new chapters, let them grow.  Zero regrets moving here but surprised at the depths of change.
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An acre of land, above.  Glad I know how to steward ornamental horticulture with agriculture, this homestead, above, does not and it's an expensive mistake.  Do you see the mistake/s?  There are no plantings maximizing pollinators through out the year.  Why does it matter?  Maximum pollinator habitat increases agricultural yields up to 80%.  In addition, no fencing to keep predators out, nor crops eaten by deer/rabbits, and where are the car & small tractor parked?  Finding the source for this pic, Mother Earth News, I discovered a better assessment of this garden, here.
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Pic, above, via Tim Cuppett Architects, here.
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Knew from first visit to our property, gravel, lots of gravel.  Drives, lanes, paths, parking courts.   Gravel is easy to work, affordable, historically accurate.  Ironically, it's also the best choice for living with timber rattlers.    
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 Pic of Vita Sackville-West by Cecil Beaton at Sissinghurst.

Clothes to garden are an issue.  Choices are year round regardless of 101f, snakes win.  Boots.  Cowboy boots, pants, pockets, long sleeves all against snakes/insects, and the phone in case something does happen.  Taking a direct hit from a century old pecan tree branch falling has been a thought.  Muck shoes for the chicken coop, rubber boots for wet days, 2 pairs of everything, front/back doors are so far apart, there is no trudging between.
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 Pic from, I Love Your Style.  Shirt by Isabel Marant, trousers by TopShop, boots by Grenson.  

A client lent me Amanda Brooks, I Love Your Style, well before moving to the homestead.  Already enjoyed, now, much resonates differently.  My homestead chores differ from Beloved's, often leading to the obvious, I cook dinner, yet this took weeks to realize.  Cooking, grocery shopping, pantry resources are a foreign language.  Have hired an expert to teach me how to menu plan, pantry plan, grocery shop, and wildly unexpected, teaching me how to use the freezer as a tool.  Asked a friend for input too, so far, my cooking = shopping/pantry/freezer/refrigerator lessons are in the kindergarten class, which is grand improvement.            



Pic from Veranda magazine.

Furlow Gatewood stole my heart, at first sighting of his potted hydrangeas, above, lining a drive.  I will use Limelight hydrangea, they are tough for heat/sun, similar large pots (already resourced the vendor), and drip irrigation.  First in inspiration, alas, they will be one of the last items placed in the garden.  Do not want to adjust them once sited.  Hearing Beloved's, "You're damn right I won't move them...."
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Pic, above, via here.

When I'm ready to put a new roof on our shed, I'll show the architect this shed, above.

The garden shed, ca. 1900, we're moving has a functional shape, not aesthetic, and was covered in aluminum at some point.  Once moved, the shed will anchor the new orchard at the front, and woodland and rolling Piedmont hills & lake view at the back, with chicken coop incorporated.  Getting the aesthetics correct, the shed will get a new roof line, matching one on the house, with awnings encircling the whole.
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Pic, above, via here.

Our front porch had been stained, long faded away.  Concrete steps are chipping grey paint.  When I saw this porch, above, I knew I had to go with the green.  Then, I discovered a similar shade of green was used by George Washington & Thomas Jefferson at their homes.  Remembering then, Monet chose an incredible green for his front porch.  I've been to all 3 homes, loved each.  Beloved is stuck on gray.
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Pic, above, from My Design Chic, you'll like the link, it's all about kitchen gardens.

My orchard/potager, will be gravel not lawn, and more orchard than potager.  Keeping maintenance low, yet fruit/vegetables/flowers, abundant.  Truly, I thought I would be planting it this month?  Instead, the only thing done has been burying one of my favorite chickens killed in a night time attack.  She was dug up, (armadillo?) 2 nites in a row, I buried her 2 more times.  Finally, Beloved, without being asked, took her in his Caterpillar to the back woodland and buried her deep.    
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Pic, above, from my previous garden, espalier apples at the front curb.  

Looking out my front door, from the central hall, is a perfect view into my neighbor's front door.  I don't 'do' that type of view.  Not in my realm.  Not a large garden space, Espalier pear trees will be planted for my view.  Obviously a better view for Linda, my neighbor, too.
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  Beloved has requested an outdoor shower.  This one, above, is in a client's garden.
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Pic, above, from a client's garden.
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Have decided to scare myself with daffodil bulbs.  When the garden is ready for siting daffodils, I'm placing a huge order with Brent & Becky's Bulbs.  Enough to feel it in the checkbook, and in the back while planting for days/days in late fall.  Why is this so extremely appealing?
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I know how to create a homestead garden but in this new layer, I must know, more finely, what to do.  Agriculture is weighted more greatly than ornamental horticulture here.  Jefferson in reverse, an old gardener but new farmer.
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Where to get the fine details?  It's humorous, needing to learn what is beyond books, knowledge residing, now, in people, kindred spirits.  
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Maine is well ahead of me, their Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, even in their name, is creating a culture of knowledge to be passed forward.  At the top of their website is this, "The history of every Nation is eventually written in the way in which it cares for its soil." - Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Signing the Soil Conservation and Soil Conservation Allotment Act.
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"MOFGA is the oldest organic agriculture organization in the country and is committed to developing a strong network of organic farmers. This network has helped them to attract and train the next generation of Maine farmers. Their Journeyperson program has 52-participants this year. Their apprenticeship program has roughly 175 beginner participants, each of whom is paired with a more seasoned farmer who can share their knowledge, experiences and best practices."
from, Martha Stewart's blog, her entire post about MOFGA, here.
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Eliot Coleman, Four Season Farm, has decades of organic experience with agriculture, livestock, & horticulture, "  

"I know of no other person who can produce better results on the land with an economy of effort and means than Eliot. He has transformed gardening from a task, to a craft, and finally to what Stewart Brand would call 'local science'."
— Paul Hawken, best-selling author and entrepreneur "
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Martha Stewart has a lovely slide show about Four Season Farm, here.  
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Keynote lecturing last weekend I learned about a program in sustainable agriculture in Wisconsin.  More resources to glean and adapt.
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Years before knowing I would move into our homestead, I've been reading Thistle Cove Farm.  Now, I look forward to scrolling backwards and take a lot of notes, to apply at our small farm.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T