Evergreen Bones: Before - After

Evergreen bones, below.  Not a first instinct.  No romance, flowers, wow factor.

Remember, evergreen bones will take you where you want to go.

Extreme gorgeous with low-maintenance, drought tolerance, no bugs is the destination.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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pics 2 years apart.  Here's your garden design: evergreen bones, evergreen flowering shrubs, evergreen flowering groundcover, flowering understory trees, flowering shrubs.  More?  Sure, if you want more maintenance.  Contrast foliage types/color, bloom seasons.
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Choose plants from Extension Service listings as best/toughest for your zone.  Who wants to worry about watering, bugs, disease?  Don't like the list?  Get over it.
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My favorite clients have already done their own garden design.  Producing, 'horrible'.  A humbling experience, I know, I did it too.  Exactly what got me into college for a 2nd degree, horticulture.

Southern Vegetable Plate

Leftovers this week, Southern vegetable plate.

Bought at, Sherry's, the local vegetable stand in Tucker, GA.

Common, too, this dinner traveled its first nite.

Served on my girlfriend's inherited Wedgwood, below.

Sadly, both meals were inside.  Temps pleasant, rains abundant & mosquitoes in charge.
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Rethinking a screened porch addition.
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More than dinners, several weekend breakfasts have been inside when all was well outside, except the mosquitoes.
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Native honey bees thrive in my garden cannot bear the thought of spraying for mosquitoes.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pics taken Sunday & Monday.  3 decades in this home, and this is the first summer mosquitoes are truly in charge.  Screened porch is in the 'talking' stage.  Missing meals outside has become more than I'm willing to do without.

Is Your Garden 'Art' on the Wall?

Every garden view should be 'art' on the wall.

2+ decades ago I visited a garden in Greensboro, NC with every window view taken into consideration.  Every window.
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Again, something learned from an 'uncredentialed' gardener changing the direction, forever, of how I design landscapes.  Not once during college did any instructor mention being inside a client's home to design a garden correctly.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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pic via Castles, Crowns & Cottages.

Garden Design & French Doors

All about conversation, comfort, nature, beauty, connection.

Though not enough lamps for someone who reads.
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You must do this with beautiful rooms.  Deconstruct them for your uses.
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French doors are a secret weapon in my arsenal of Garden Design.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Room by Billy Baldwin.

Copy Interior for Garden Design

This would be easy to work into a garden design.

Copy: colors (trinity: blue-brown-white), patterns, shapes.  And the table, in stone.  Bring 3 together, add a pair of chandeliers 'almost' exactly like, above.
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Obviously, hydrangeas would be in the garden.  This is Vanishing Threshold, house & garden are one.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pic via House of Turquoise.  www.houseofturquoise.com

Billy Baldwin said, ".....

Billy Baldwin lived here for a bit.

"The grounds of the house fell sharply from a terrace, which had no railing, but the barrier was indicated by pots of blooming flowers.  Among his annual visitors were Igor Stravinsky and his wife, and one of the things that enchanted Igor about going to Stark's for the weekend was that he could hardly wait until after every meal to go to the edge of the terrace and piss over the precipice." from, Billy Baldwin an Autobiography
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pic  via here.  House in the quote is not the house above.

Gardener's Kitchen

This, below, has already gone to my contractor.

A gardener's kitchen.

All about the garden view.
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Contractor's response, "You can't afford to lose cabinet space."
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Whatever.
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Sitting in the kitchen now, I'm imagining how much more garden I will see.  Wind, birds, blooms, snow, rains, fall foliage, exfoliating bark, berries....
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics via Cote de Texas.  Of course new counters & painting too.  Kitchen is almost 3 decades, my starter kitchen, a relief to discover its next chapter.

Front Porch: A Way to Test Design

Good design is pretty, comfortable, affordable, leverages activities and your spirit.

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Good design is also 'testable'.

With a camera.  Can you take spur-of-the-moment pics and they are worthy of a magazine, catalogue or book cover?
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If you must 'style' your pics so far from how you truly live in the space you're not done designing the space.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pics Susanne Hudson's front porch, last month, which is mere feet from a busy road.
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Last weekend a client showed me a pic of her baby granddaughter in the garden.  It could have been used in a magazine for toddlers. A quick snap without thought of the background beauty.  And that was intentional in the Garden Design.  The client 'got it' after the pic.  Granddaughter, grandma & designer....trinity of happy!

2 Questions for Patios, Decks, Porches

Graduating with another degree, horticulture, I was fully aware creating the gardens of my soul had yet to be discovered.  

Luckily Penny McHenry came into my life.  She invited me to lunch the first evening we met.  A lecture meeting with packed audience we were in the 3rd row.  I plopped next to her & knew she wasn't amused.  We began talking, garnered a stern glance from the speaker then talked so long the security guard asked us to leave, the building was closing.

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In her garden, the next day, one of the biggest theatrical curtains of Garden Design opened when I saw her back deck.  From the first glance I knew.

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When looking at a patio there are 2 questions.  Is this space so wonderful I must see inside the house?  Is this space so wonderful I must see the garden?

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Ironic.  Patios, porches, decks, & their styling, were not mentioned during my degree program.  Nor any symposium I had ever attended.

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Penny did it from innate talent.

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Innately I knew, copy good ideas.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pic Susanne Hudson's front porch last month.

Outdoor Kitchen

A friend gave Susanne Hudson this Hoosier cabinet a couple of years ago.

Until recently it sat gaining more rust behind her carriage house.
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She realized it fit perfectly with her color theme: green, brown, white.  Into the garden it arrived.
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Garden & Be Well, XO   Tara
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Perhap this should be done in aluminum for gardens.....  Metal Outdoor Hoosier Cabinet with gas grill, the sales slip should read.  Perfect for those not wanting the huge stone aka "I've tumbled from Mars out of the last surviving Apollo Soyuz rocket payload" outdoor kitchen.
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I was hired as the 2nd garden designer for a project because things weren't 'quite right'.  Their outdoor kitchen had been placed on perfect axis with the family room.  What a view,  stove-fridge-counter-cabinets.  Not!  It was moved to the side, which was much more convenient, and the garden became the focal point.
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Remember well when the Russians arrived for Apollo Soyuz, they clogged up the grocery store lines when  they did not want to pay USA taxes on their purchases.  Trinkety things, lots of lipstick etc....  Of course they used USA roads, police protection, & more provided with USA tax dollars.  Even as a young teen I knew something was 'wrong'.  Their clothes could have been in a period drama from the poverty 1930's.  They moved as a pod, or school of fish,  fearful of their surroundings.  Their skin was pasty white, their hair was flat, and all eyes were huge, darting quickly, never settling, no smiles.    Many of the engineers at NASA were against this mission.  Why hand over engineering know-how?  This is obviously a Cold War memory.  The worst part was their own security detail.  Wanting to prevent defections during their stay.    

Front Porch: Long & Narrow

Placing table + chairs at the 'L' of a porch must be in the helix of our DNA.

The web has enough pictures to fill a seductive hardcover coffee table book.

 At the opposite end of the porch, above, more seduction, below.

Places to read, serve a meal, have conversation a basic trinity for your porch.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics shot last month on Susanne Hudson's porch.  A field gathered collection of furniture with a tight trinity of color: green, brown, white.  Comfort oozes in her still life's.

Front Porch Plants

Choose pots, containers, plant stands so fabulous they can remain empty, if desired.

It's obvious, below, these plant stands can remain empty or filled easily for a party or whim.

Hydrangeas are in their black plastic container, hidden with erosion control fabric.
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This front porch is meant for reading, I'll give you something worthy: "Wendy (nothing to do with Peter Pan but short for Wendell) Howell was a grand American gone native (How yer dawgs?) whom I prized as a friend because she did not take to just anyone and made an exception for me.  She like whippets and whisky and had too many of both.  Lots of husbands (including a Roosevelt) had come and gone and she eventually settled with a lady vet in one of those Irish cottages which were rare then and now only happen on postcards.  It had an earth floor and stable doors and, in the sitting room, a vast opening for the fireplace where, if you bent down to look up the chimney, you could see a big patch of sky. At the entrance to the cottage was a sculpture of two whippets, old friends to me as they were an echo of a similar model by Gott at Chatsworth.  Wendy held a pilot's licence but luckily never offered to take me for a spin."  Debo Mitford.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pics taken last month Susanne Hudson's front porch.