How To Hide A Fence

Asked to hide a fence at the back of their garden in a tiny, dingy corner,

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the MUSE said, "Put in an 'L' shaped Conservatory, gravel terrace, chandelier from the oak tree, a dining table underneath & build it from rescued parts."
It wasn't an option, below, to see the ugly fence from all these windows.
Recently completed, below, on a garden tour for Hay House, in Macon, GA. (These are smart people, create a BIG deadline!)
Artist in residence for the garden tour R. Scott Coleman, here, watercolors.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Since I designed this garden missives have been sent showing the progress. Many building parts are ca. 1870. Did you see the fence? Love my MUSE. Puppet Barbuda cringes thinking how Mr. Testosterone-On-Wheels-Mow-Blow-Go would have designed this dark little corner.

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Pics from The Daily Landscape.

Landscaping After The Tornadoes

Lecturing near tornado devastation yesterday I had time to meet & speak with the Floyd County Master Gardeners & Rome, GA mayor.
Let's do a Free Landscape Design Symposium.

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Siting trees properly cools in summer, heats in winter. Contouring turf properly reduces mowing-fertilizer-chemicals-water-maintenance; more space for flowering shrubs & groundcovers creating maximum pollinator habitat & beauty. Choosing paint colors, light fixtures, patio/deck shape. And the fun of siting focal points.

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Lovely garden, curb appeal, raised property value. Greater tax receipts.

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Puppet Barbuda went in for the kill, with the mayor, on that last bit. Increased Tax Receipts!

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In hindsight the mayor looked like a deer in headlights. Hmm. Puppet Barbuda was in her element. In hindsight Puppet Barbuda should have let the mayor speak. In Puppet Barbuda's defense, she had little time with the mayor before mounting the stage to lecture. Think Puppet Barbuda would miss a single second of STAGE TIME?

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Stopped at Liz's Antique Barn on the way out of Rome. Puppet Barbuda found a TUTU.

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Took the pic in France moons ago.

How To Copy A Design

Before her bedroom, below, I fell for the garden & parking court in the movie, Something's Gotta Give.Hunting/gathering last week, $20, gotta love it

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"Every garden needs a desk.", Susanne Hudson said. Crazy idea, yes?

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Life is good. Bedroom & garden will BOTH get a desk/chair.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Zero idea how to reconfigure the bedroom for a desk/chair & zero idea where to put a desk/chair in the garden. This challenge is pure catnip.

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.

Sir Cecil Beaton In Reddish

"Cecil was actually the first person ever to walk me round a garden, which he regularly did at his house in Reddish.This seemingly simple act, like so many in one's life, was seminal in opening up to me the very idea that one could actually make a garden at all." Sir Roy Strong, about his friend Sir Cecil Beaton.
Do you walk friends round your garden?
Do you have friends that walk you round their garden?

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I do.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics taken in my garden last week. FYI, zero watering for these plants. Beauty Without Effort; great mantra to me. Just another little detail why "sustainable" is such a COS. (Does this show Puppet Barbuda's age?) Sustainable? Why accept sooooooo little? FTS.

Turning A Hedge Into Entries

For decades I've designed gardens. What I know for sure? It's not about the plants. By the time someone contacts me they are in a new chapter of life, sometimes a new book. Are they aware? Mostly, no.

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When the garden is born again, their life is changed.

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My job is to "capture the humanity of what is under way".

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Myriad times I've taken 1-2 plants out of a hedge & put in a path. Creating 2 entries instead of 2 dead-ends. Isn't the vocabulary stunning? Entries vs. dead-ends.

Then, it happened to me. A hedge in front of my home became entries.

Within the new hedge/entry a potager became a gravel terrace with adirondack chairs, a place to have lunch, talk on the phone, eat breakfast, read, sit still waiting for hummingbirds to fly so close I can hear their wings. And the Chinese snowball blossoms drop their petals in benediction of the foxgloves, above, about to bloom next.

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How could I know when the entry was born I would have a new room to LIVE in? And I had entered a new chapter.

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It's easier to see a new chapter in a client's life.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics taken in my garden last week. I've done more than the Bay Terrace the past year. A Conservatory, Tea Olive Terrace, Natchez Terrace. Though I didn't know it while creating these garden rooms they have given me the strength to finish a book in my life.

Chinoiserie & Design

Wisteria 'Amethyst Falls' at my front door today. A tiny area, yet interesting, and welcoming. (Without moving my feet these pics are a scan from left to right.) Peeking beyond the Wisteria, below, urn/plinth on axis with my bay window.
Filtered thru Wisteria foliage, above, the gravel terrace with large flagstones leading to the frontdoor.
The little Pot Cluster, above, and adirondack chair.
Classic Landscape Design, above, and pollinator habitat. (High & low density, canopy/understory, walls, floor, contrasting foliage textures/colors.)
Landscape Design's Pulitzer Prize, above. Beauty, privacy, low maintenance, organic, all season interest, pollinator habitat, fragrance, fantasy within reality, a place to sit, a spot viewed on axis from within the house.

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Take the camera view a bit to the right you'll see neighbor's homes, their cars, their landscaping, the street. Honestly, who wants to live that way? Seeing neighbor's stuff? It's not my realm. The pics above ARE my realm.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Puppet Barbuda apologizes for bluntness in her captions today. Puppet Barbuda is zealous in details of landscape design/pollinator habitat. Puppet Barbuda disdains the ridiculosity of pretty garden pictures focusing on 'a plant', 'how to dig a hole', 'plant them 2.5432" apart'. Information providing you nothing about putting a beautiful garden together. When Puppet Barbuda reads interior design books/blogs/magazines they don't tell her how to produce the fabric on the couch, how to dye it, cut it, sew it, staple it & etc.....they appreciate she has a BRAIN.

How To Design Delight

Necessities of life delighting me in other gardens. Gravel, chair, hydrangeas-roses-sasanqua-boxwood, collection of old watering cans. Of course I designed them into my garden.
Provocateurs of epiphany.
And beauty.
Filled with rainwater from the same storms killing-destroying in North Carolina, Chinese snowball petals fragrant at the top end of new decay.

Always, on to the next season. Always.

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Always, leaving this season. Always.

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Frisson, more delightful & engaging than perfection, to me.

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What is delightful to you in a garden? It's this simple, yes, to design delight into your garden.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics from my Potager this week.

Landscape Design: Copy

Tea Olive Terrace, below, yesterday morning, pic taken from my upstairs office window.
Why shouldn't I copy what I loved while studying landscapes in Italy? Copy, it's a rule of Landscape Design.
No money & no time are no match for DESIRE. (Tea Olive Terrace, aka side-yard, abuts the street. Private, gorgeous, emotionally enthralling EVERYDAY.)
English Daisy's blooming, annual blue ageratum will bloom late summer, rudbeckia fulgida x fulgida, yellow, bloom now till Christmas.
In Italy, above, this week. Nothing I don't have in a 'working class' cluster home subdivision in USA.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Bottom pic from Paul Gervais in Italy. Enjoy his blog, I do !.

Bunny Mellon Style

A garden, below, needing tending or a garden tended to perfection?
Is this garden, below, your idea of heaven or a mess? (Have this garden, below, in any post 1985 deed restricted subdivision & you'll get 'nastygrams' from the HOA demanding it be 'weeded'.)
A fairy tale, below, or needs pruning?
Bunny Mellon likes it SCRUFFY !!

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A woman to love.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Oddly, I've always been repelled by deeply manicured landscapes. Repelled & disgusted by tidy landscapes omitting an intellectual component entirely. Is Puppet Barbuda being too vague in her dislikes? Puppet Barbuda abhors subdivision tidy landscapes installed by the 'builder' and maintained ad nauseum thru the decades; as if tidiness is an excuse for a 'decent' landscape or an intellect.

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Vanity Fair has a lovely article, where the pics came from, about Bunny Mellon here.

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 !)

Trianon Palace Versailles

Petite Trianon, below.I remember well, age 16, walking into the lobby, below, of the Trianon Palace hotel.
Our room had 2 walls of French doors opening onto gardens, below.
In that room I lost my
retainer. Carried away on the breakfast tray by room service.

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There was a wedding the first nite. I felt like 'Sabrina' watching the party from a tree. A band & singer sounding like Sinatra.

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Earlier in the day touring Versailles. The Hall of Mirrors belonged to my mother & me, no one else there. Workman recreating carved mouldings and gilding them in some of the rooms. I was able to talk with them, touch what they were doing.

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Then the gardens.

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There is only 1 picture of me in my home on display. It's here, in my office, I am standing in the garden at Versailles.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Top pic from Habitually Chic. Alas, I never saw the Petite Trianon. Other pics from Trianon Palace Versailles.

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In the garden at Versailles my mother found a place to sit. I spent hours alone, wandering the gardens. A harbinger of my favorite way to tour a garden. That day I knew something was 'wrong' with my mother. The gardens electrified me. Mother sat, bored (or happy to be rid of me while I wandered). There was no discussion of the gardens between us. I had no vocabulary to speak of gardens. Nor did I perceive it was acceptable to like the garden so much. I was silenced. That didn't last.