Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: Williamsburg, VA

A perfect distance from the house.  The Tea House.  

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller's home in Williamsburg, VA.  She spent April/October here yearly.

The scale is exquisite.

Knowing a bit about the depth of her philanthropy the scale and sweetness of her home speak much of her character.
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Her gardens are intelligent, potent in simplicity, narrative, formality, rusticity, line, axis, Nature.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics taken earlier this month while I was lecturing in Colonial Williamsburg, VA.

Axis of Ugly: Views from this Gorgeous Interior

Interior attention to detail. 

Exterior attention to detail?
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A grill.  Swathed in vinyl, no less.  Perhaps to match the countertops?  No, to match the ovens.
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Axis of Ugly: Breakfast room window view.  Yard (yes, yard, obviously not garden) door view.  Window above the sink view.  And, probably dining room view, upstairs bedroom views.....
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Why is this acceptable?  Generally it's the person bankrolling the interior demanding the grill, hence, acceptable.  Until that person reads a post like this.  Go ahead, you know you want to show it to him.
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Garden & Be Well,       XO Tara
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Why so hard on this topic?  "Men come to build sooner than to garden finely as if gardening were the greater art." Pope, 17th century.  Beautiful pics of interiors that denigrate the landscape are harmful to my profession.  
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How to fix this?  Simplest? Hinged shutters, painted color of chair seats, above, in front of grill.  Fold & lean against wall when using grill.  
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Pic via Cote de Texas.
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Axis of Ugly.  Rather proud of that one !!  Would be a great lecture title for Puppet Barbuda.....

New Table Topper

Recent acquisition, below.  She shows 4 coats of paint thru the years, each different.

And the new harvest table, a birthday surprise.

Noticed the hen at my favorite Stone Mountain, GA Old Post Office Antique Mall before lecturing in Williamsburg, VA earlier this month.

Decided to buy her, if she was still there, when I got home.

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She's perfect.

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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara

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They wanted $20, got her for $15.  City prices, but I really wanted her.  Breakfast, in the pics, yesterday.  Why did I only buy 3 grapefruit, they taste like candy.

Choose the Right Doormat

Doormats with writing?  No.  Front door, home & garden are the trinity saying, 'Welcome'.

This doormat, above, recently sold for over half a million pounds.

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Footnotes

• Property of a Lady
  
  Provenance: 
  The temple stone was removed from 'Brackenhill', an early 20th Century Tudor Revival house in Crowborough, East Sussex. From 1935, Brackenhill was the home of William Murdoch Thyne (1878-1949), a Scottish civil engineer working in Ceylon between 1915 and 1937, and later in Jamaica. Thyne was responsible for the design and execution of many large reservoir projects including the raising of the Labugama Dam in Sri Lanka and the filtration works for Colombo. He was a Vice-President of the Ceylon Engineering Association and is recorded as having used elephants for the lifting of heavy masonry at Labugama. Thyne and his wife, Lilian, returned to Brackenhill in 1937 prior to departure for Jamaica where he was appointed chief engineer and member of the water commission at Kingston. During the Thynes absence from home in 1938-39 it would appear Brackenhill was let to Oscar Mackrill, a solicitor, and his family. Mr. Thyne continued living at Brackenhill after his wife's death in 1949 and died in Crowborough in 1952, whence the house and temple stone passed into the possession of the current vendor's family.

More about this sale, here, from Bonhams.com .
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pic via Bonhams.  Major take away?  When the finder of the doormat died, his home was sold, doormat included.  It was the new owners who won the doormat lottery.  One of the best garden stories I've read in years.   For all  Lucia fanatics a new chapter must be written.

Design Request

Jan. 15, 2013
Tara,

  Are you up to a serious challenge? We have moved back to Mobley, where our lecture practice is because of changes in the firm and how much travel we had been doing every day. We need a simpler, less complicated life and more time to enjoy it.

  We have purchased a Craftsman bungalow from the twenties that had serious issues. We have now taken care of most of the serious infrastructure issues and taken it back to the beginning from an unfortunate 60s remodel.

  I refer to it as Boo Radley’s house, from To Kill a Mockingbird. An elderly gentleman, James Wilde, went to GA Tech in the 30s, had a breakdown and never left the house again. He was much loved by his family who looked after him until he passed away several years ago. When we bought the house his mama’s fur coat was still across the chair, his daddy was a General in WW1 & 2 and his uniform was still upstairs.

His family was very reluctant to sell it but since I am a distant cousin they finally relented rather than have it fall in which would have probably happened within a year or two.

  Outside also has serious issues. James swept the yard every day so there is not a grain of top soil, the last known particle was sighted in the 50’s. He was also obsessed with water encroaching on the house and dug major ditches everywhere. We have an acre, but our backyard is a 25 acre pecan orchard. Our neighbor is a funeral home. We have a fence between us and I have planted Confederate Jasmine to separate us from the grieving families.

  There was a garage behind which we have taken the sides off of for a back porch. We have a wonderful front porch and now having become charter members of the Dull Dogs Society, one of our favorite activities is watching the neighbor’s 20 something cats cross the street for meal times.

  We are having to pay a bucket of money to sell the Milledgeville house, but I would rather do that than lose Charles because of the stress we have been under. This means we have a very limited budget to work with but I believe a good plan is the most important thing and we can do it in stages with us doing most of the work. I know we are going to have to plow in tons of compost for anything to grow.

My 1^st priority would be the front. I see a cottage garden with picket fence to  give it enclosure and garden rooms. Our daughter, Bliss, may be getting married in the next year and I would love to have a garden reception in front yard, Bliss may have other ideas. Our house is in town and in walking distance to church and square. Next would be a Koi pond near the back outdoor living space and possibly a potager. I am afraid we are probably looking at serious grading issues.

I could not find any old invoices and could not remember fees etc. Could you please give me a ball park price idea so we know how to proceed.

  I love your blog and it starts my day every day.

Talk to you soon,  Penny

April 19, 2013

Tara,

  I will be sending you pictures of our nonexistent garden. There are no Garden Views. Most of the main rooms overlook an asphalt paving lot of a funeral home next door. The front looks out to a wide boulevard ending in the Veterans’ Memorial Park, very small park mostly granite memorials. Our main room also looks out to an empty home that a friend has purchased but has been unable to restore when the bank was shut down and she lost all of her stock. The side of the house with the bedrooms and study do have possibilities.

At this point we have put up a 6 foot fence between us and the funeral home on which I planted Confederate Jasmine which I pray over daily to grow to provide a barrier between us and the grieving families. We have also put up plantation shutters on the lower parts of wonderful windows to give us privacy. The kitchen will do for now, however at some point in the future I would like to reconfigure the arrangement with windows more like the original overlooking the back instead of the funeral home. I tore out a nasty bath to reopen a wide central hall. We have also torn off the sides of a pitiful garage to make an outdoor room. The main inhabitants of this are our ancient babies, Cossette and Arthur and Hal the cat. Looking down the hall is a terrible view of Charles’s grill which needs a new placement but I am not sure where.

 We have taken down a dreadful chain link fence that cut off most of the back and was the invisible fence line. This weekend we are installing  a fence along both sides of the property but leaving the back open. We are putting a picket fence across the side of the house at the part of the house where the porch begins and a gate for the driveway. Arthur and Cossette are so old and senile they have been wandering through the invisible fence and ending up in the street. Bob, the Corgi, has been so traumatized by not understanding the invisible boundaries he won’t leave the house so it needs to go. We have a wonderful 35 acre pecan orchard behind our house that they can play in but it is overgrown at this point.

My thoughts are to do another Koi Pond near the back outdoor room. Brother was nice enough to have already dug a ditch or depression that has possibilities. I think the only hope for most of the back is some grading.

One of the best parts of the house is the old fashioned front porch where we spend a lot of time. I have been thinking of a picket fence with a cottage garden feel on both sides with boxwoods, other shrubs anchoring it. The house is really a focal point for the veterans park looking down the Blvd. There could easily be a separate garden room on the other part of the front yard, with a gate leading from the front and another to the back, perhaps with the gargoyle head on a plinth and a small pool. There is a natural transition with some wonderful 100 year old camellias and sasanquas. I have been trying for months to get 2 old camellias moved that block the front of the house to this line and hopefully that will happen this weekend. When I was talking about this to someone they showed me a picture in an Bob Piaf book that I believe was his home that was very close to this. I will try to find the book. It is really sad that this is not on the other side of the house with the main rooms.

  Can’t wait to see you next month!  Penny

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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

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I leave next month for this project.  They hired me to spiff up a shady back corner at their previous home.  Somehow the Muse decided a Conservatory was the exact spiffy answer.  Southern Living has it featured this month.

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Top pic Windsor Smith.  Bottom pic Paris Through My Lens.

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Client notes were copied with names/locations changed.  

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L-O-V-E MY J-O-B 

How Would You Solve This?

Quite nice color echo from purple furniture to loropetalum.

What would you do, below, with this 'pedestrian' landscape?  Very tight budget, of course.

Shutters as the budget allows.  More importantly, pruning the shrubs into espalier next to the house.  I'm thinking 10' tall at most.  Lush.
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Adore solutions costing 'zero'.
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Her solution to the improperly scaled window boxes is brilliant.  Remove the wood boxes, place a stone shelf on the iron brackets and place several terra cotta pots.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics taken in a client garden last week.

Lunch then Working the Muse

Last week at a jobsite, below.  

A 2nd appointment to draw on-site.

I knew mostly what the garden would look like.

Sideways conversations tell me more about what a garden should become.

When she offered lunch I knew it would make her garden better.

She apologized for the plates, not in good shape, they had belonged to her grandmother.  Precious, an old soul.
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After Lunch the Muse created:
 A roundabout in center of 4 oak trees on axis with the front door on axis with a gate creating a double axis, hedge of forsythia on lower slope hiding the street, cross axis with the roundabout for another double axis, foundation plantings removed espaliered sasanquas added & a pair of urns on plinths on axis with 2 front windows, 3 pair of low columns with urns, a bench shaded with figs in the orchard, a harvest table + chandelier in the crape myrtle allee, a garden cottage facing blueberries & fruit trees & Tara Turf, expanded deck with a window from the breakfast room turned into French doors, 3 sets of stairs at the deck, a gravel terrace from the drive to the deck, enlarged gravel parking court, moved existing shrubs to targeted zones hiding neighbor's homes, removed RxR ties from potager and reused concrete textured blocks, changed color of fencing & house, 3 stone benches within the forsythia hedge, all Tara Turf with entire garden riding mower available & etc.
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It felt like the Muse was taking dictation.  Uncovering what had been there for a century.  When the Muse is happy & working it feels like a drug.  No.  It is a drug.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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A BLT no chemical lunch.  Wonderful.

Skyscaping & Landscaping

Italian cypress & Chinese snowball skyscape, below.

                                       Dwarf Indian hawthorn, below, at the base of the Italian cypress.

You must skyscape & landscape.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics in my garden this week.  My sweet, tiny, makes-me-happy, garden.   

A Lawn Rule: Before & After

Came for the art show, a first visit, earlier this month.  He, we hadn't met before, asked a few garden questions.  Within moments, "Your lawn is in charge & you must be in charge of your lawn", I said.

I described a typical Victorian shape, for their Victorian home, rectangular with the corners worn away leaving an oval of turf.  Corners filled in with stone.

Earlier this week he sends me these pics, above/below.

I know, without asking, more pics will arrive.
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Loving what he's done and can't wait for the 'corners' to be filled.
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And I'm sure he remembers my comment about a focal point on axis with the front window, at right, above.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Top pic mine.  Is your lawn in charge?  

Choosing Dishes & Joy

What is the fuss about cooking?  

The big event here is choosing dishes, napkins, silver.

 

Before dinner I took pics in the garden.  The light was soft.  Chinese snowball, above, is peeking.
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Cannot imagine living in a home without a beautiful garden.  A moat of grace.  When the world is crazy my garden makes it sane again.  When life harbors great joy my garden increases it.  Potent.
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The best selling book of all time is full of garden metaphors for living.
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Never met Tasha Tudor but understand her favorite line of poetry, 'take joy'.  She's right, joy is always there.  
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pics taken early yesterday evening.  Salad, chicken, field peas with snaps.....  Notice I had dishes with no food commentary?   But the garden wasn't left out !  I do have priorities.

The Perfect Flower Stand

Something new learned from something old, below.

A flower stand must be so fabulous......it needs no flowers!
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pic taken last weekend in Colonial Williamsburg, VA.  This is from Bassett Hall, home of Abby Rockefeller.
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Love the colors, slab of light, scale, calm, bricks with the redolence of .........     something I can't quite name.    A sweetness with harshness, a story.  

Keeping Quirky in a Landscape

A 1945 cottage guest room, using what the client has.

Its original landscape lost to history.   Awnings, below, will remain.  Delightfully quirky.

Quirkier are the azaleas, above, perhaps early 2000?
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Other parts of the landscape design will be 'done'.  These azaleas are pure Folk Art.  Adore having elements of a landscape design that don't look 'done'.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pics taken last week at client project.  Have seen these shingles used on homes from New York to Georgia.