Design The Past Into The Future

"There is no future in the past." A narrow, mundane & sad thought.  'With little imagination', as Anne of Green Gables would say.  

 It's a thrill to Landscape Design century old farm buildings & trees, 'the past', into the future.

Using plantings & methods of the past, and the gardens of ancient Italy as template.
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Creating a sense of intimacy when the space is 100's of acres.
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FRISSON:  Excitement at the front end of winter, bare branched trees.  Sasanqua's coated in bloom at the tail end of fall.
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Each, at the same moment.
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Creating a landscape taking care of your spirit more than you will ever have to take care of it.
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I love putting a new future into the past.  
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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pics taken last week at a project.

Signature Style

Did you notice, below, the shelf above the sink?

 An old pie safe, hung on the wall.

Susanne Hudson has several signatures, this is one.
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Every time I see her pie-safe-on-a-wall-routine, it's FRESH !
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I love bringing Susanne into my projects.  Team Tara knows when to bring in specialists.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

A Florida Room

Florida room, below, looking toward the front yard of a 1940 cottage.

 Florida room, below, looking toward the backyard.

This cottage is The Velveteen Rabbit.  Life shows in her cracks & broken bits but it's obvious she's always been loved.
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Friend & peer Sandra Jonas gustily laughed at my reference, 'Florida room'.
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Whatever.
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I'm calling it a Florida room.  What would you call it?
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics taken last week.  Still in the design phase on this project.  Honestly, Sandra dahling,  these pics are for YOU.  Ha, the rest of you have already painted & stuffed the Florida room with furniture, art, sisal, new light fixtures.......  I love this phase.  Total possibility.  

Design So You Don't Have Style Anything

She set her hat down, below, before coming into the house.

She wasn't home yet when I took the pic last week.
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My favorite type of pic.  No styling.  Real.
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This is her life.  Unfiltered.
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Simple.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Seeing another woman, over a decade ago, set her hat down upon a kitchen table creating a beautiful vignette without effort, I knew, design interiors and exteriors leveraging life and be beautiful.  No styling.

How Green Affects Serenity

Layers of green create serene landscapes.  Green: groundcovers, bushes, understory trees, canopy trees, & etc.

I came into gardening All-About-The-Flowers.  I discovered them to be temporary friends & high maintenance.
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No worries, green things bloom too.  A bigger discovery, green layers in landscapes create Serenity.  Fast.
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Layering greens maximizes pollinator habitat too.  Providence winking, "You're doing this right."
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pic via Content In A Cottage  .  Amid all my greens of course I have flowers: abelia, camellia, rose, tea olive, dianthus, ageratum, rosemary, English daisy, azalea & etc.

Gardening With Dogs

Georgia red clay, white dog, below, and a contractor

needing to get a load of mulch spread.  FAST.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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How to landscape with dogs?  Pay attention to their habits & assume every plant is toxic.  Where a dog runs, digs, lays rarely changes.  Incorporate it into the design.  Toxic plants?  I worry more about little sticks or rocks being eaten and twisting the intestines.  If azaleas, camellias and hydrangeas, along with native plants, were extremely toxic the South would be known for a lot of dead dogs.  Hence, use plants long known to be used with dogs in the yard.
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A client sent the pic to my contractor !

Urns, Architecture & Sex

David W. Dunlap, in the New York Times last week, wrote about these urns, below.

 Heavy & fearing liability the building owner, Atria, decided to remove them.  (If I wasn't a Landscape Designer I would be selling roof finials.  We must have our arcane passions.)

 In a rare twist, Atria, after requests, replicated the urns in a lighter material (not cheap), above, to replace the old urns.

When she saw the old urns coming down, Kennedy Fraser, above, said, "It was one of the most traumatic days of my life."   A woman I understand.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Puppet Barbuda enthralled by Fraser, and wanting to know, "Where the h**l did the old urns go?", Googled for answers.  One must have priorities with their time when the to-do list is 4 centuries long.
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Delightfully, Puppet Barbuda was swept up in the sexual peccadilloes of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Violet Trefusis, a king & etc.  From a review of,  Mrs. Keppel And Her Daughter, in the New York Times, by Kennedy Fraser,
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" The English have always believed they can do anything they want as long as they do it in a foreign country. For the rest of her life, Violet lived in France or in the palace Mrs. Keppel bought for herself near Florence. Once the die was cast, Violet reached a truce with Denys. It was he who introduced her to the Princesse de Polignac, the former Winnaretta Singer. She was immensely rich and had had many lovers before Violet, including Romaine Brooks and Olga de Meyer, who was reputed to be one of Bertie's illegitimate children. The Princess's intimates were all gay and lesbian artists. She was a great art collector and patron of composers. Her salons were famous. Cocteau, Poulenc, Valery and Proust were frequent visitors. Like Kingy, she entertained opulently and with great ceremony; like him she was stout, middle-aged and far too grand for scandal to stick to. When she took her new favorite on a trip up the Nile, Mrs. Keppel, Pawpaw and Denys accepted the Princess's civil invitation to join them."
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Puppet Barbuda doesn't know where the old urns are.  In fantasy her guy with a truck, stuffed with heavy urns, are tootling back from NYC to a little garden in Stone Mountain, GA.
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Pics, by David w. Dunlap, from the NYTimes article.  

Fieldstone Steps

Fieldstone steps, below.  Pure labor, no mortar/concrete.

Cheapest choice when I began my career.  Now, depending upon the jobsite, pre-cut stone is cheaper.  Easier to handle they reduce labor expense.
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Of course, my favorite, is field stone.
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Oddly, at the front end of availability pre-cut stone steps were the most expensive.  
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More odd, I meet people now, who think field stone steps are, by far, the cheaper choice.  
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Found the pic online.  Must put in some days taking pics of our projects, good excuse to see them again too.

Details Of Simplicity

Almost 30 years ago this bench, below, was the first thing she bought for her garden.

 A classic faux bois, the details are rich.  Timeless.

Her husband said he had been pressure washing it for years, it was time to do it again.
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We turned our heads to him, in unison, "No, never again !"
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Notice the dreadful mulch?  Worst thing about college for landscape design, promoting mulch.  This garden now has dwarf sarcoccocca to spread and hold the soil.  Evergreen, shade, it blooms fragrantly in February.  It was difficult to find, and expensive when found.  A victim of the contraction of the retail/wholesale garden center industries.  Doubt I'll be putting it into plans in the future as often as in the past.
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Garden & Be Well,        XO Tara

Landscape Jewelry

Last week, & for decades, the driveway was the focal point of this landscape.  

 Now, Urn/Plinth are a focal point on axis with the front door creating Pleasure Grounds.

 Urn/Plinth are quite large, the house is deceptively large with its 10' height at terrace level.

Most important, the Urn/Plinth can remain empty, or be planted.
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The quiet elegance of the Urn/Plinth are jewelry in the landscape.
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Jewelry a bit out of her comfort zone.  Enough to mention to her grown children it should be taken by one of them when her estate is dispersed.  You do remember what to ask yourself when buying a focal point for the garden, "Is this so wonderful it will be fought over at my estate sale?"
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Garden & Be Well,       XO Tara

Downspout Column: Color

The eye picks up a white downspout, below, as an architectural column.

Don't let this happen to you.
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Sherwin-Williams: Best Bronze.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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