Fast Company: Science, Brains, High Ceilings

In a subdivision, along the side of the house, I've done this design, below, dozens of times.  It's a formula that never tires.  Allee of trees, shrubs, path, and done.
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Yet, why does this condensed space, typically between 2 houses, live 'large' ?



Creating a patio/terrace/deck garden room, below, again, I wonder, "what makes this small space live so large?"



Inside, below, with a vanishing threshold into the garden, I ask myself, "Why does this room live so big?"




Years spent wondering why my little garden, surrounded much-too-closely with neighbors at every view, lives so entirely large.  More, how does a small space live large AND feel like it's living on another continent in a different era?
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Seriously, years.  College degrees in engineering & horticulture, decades of reading garden/architecture books, decades attending garden lectures/symposia, with zero mention of small space gardens living large.
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Slow, but the answer arrived.  The sky.  All of the above Garden Designs use the SKY as an element.  Garden Design frames the sky.  Better, you own the sky.  No matter where the sky goes near your home, you own it.
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Another word for 'sky' in Garden Design?  Ceiling.
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This is going somewhere important, stay with me.
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High ceilings, in real estate, cost more money.  Across cultures/era/continents humans pay a premium for high ceilings.  Why?  Science, now, has an answer.

"... participants were more likely to judge a room beautiful if it had a high ceiling compared with a low ceiling. But the greater insight emerged when Vartanian and collaborators studied brain activity. They found heightened activity related to high ceilings in the left precuneus and left middle frontal gyrus—two areas associated with visuospatial exploration. The left precuneus, in particular, has been found to increase in cortical thickness after spatial navigation training.

So another part of the appeal of high ceilings seems to be that they capture our visual attention and engage our desire to observe our surroundings. Vartanian and company ruled out other explanations based on the imaging data, including the possibility that high ceilings simply put us in a good mood. That idea didn't pan out because participants looking at high and low ceilings showed no fMRI difference in brain regions related to pleasure, emotion, or reward."...

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Garden Design, using the sky, wields a potency to our brains we cannot produce ourselves.  Amusing.  Another tidbit from Providence, the first Garden Designer, and best.  

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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara

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Pics, above, Pinterest board, Vanishing Threshold.

From Fast Company, the full article:

Why Our Brains Love High Ceilings

Not just for bragging rights.

One of the first things a realtor will point out to prospective home buyers or apartment tenants is a high ceiling. To many of us, anything above the standard eight-foot ceiling is a big selling point. In recent times, home buyers have tended to pony up for the amenity of nine-foot ceilings; in the abstract, when added heights aren't adding to mortgages or rents, people prefer their ceilings 10 feet high.

Part of the appeal of high ceilings is no doubt related to a general preference for space, but the behavioral and brain evidence suggests there's more to it than that. Some research from a few years back ties high ceilings to a psychological sense of freedom. And new neuroimaging work shows that a tall room triggers our tendencies toward spatial exploration.

"You can imagine that our enjoyment of rooms with higher ceilings could be due to these two processes working in tandem," psychologist Oshin Vartanian of the University of Toronto-Scarborough tells Co. Design. "On the one hand, such rooms promote visuospatial exploration, while at the same time they prompt us to think more freely. This could be a rather potent combination for inducing positive feelings."

A Liberated Mindset

A few years ago, marketing scholars Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu wanted to see whether the height of a ceiling had any impact on the way a person thinks. So they recruited test participants for a number of different experiments and modified the study rooms so that some had 10-foot ceilings and others had (false) eight-foot ceilings. Meyers-Levy and Zhu also hung up Chinese lanterns so participants would look up and, consciously or not, process the ceiling height.

Working in a high-ceiling environment (left) put participants in a freer, more abstract mindset than did a low-ceiling setting.Via Journal of Consumer Research

Across several experiments, the researchers found evidence that high ceilings seemed to put test participants in a mindset of freedom, creativity, and abstraction, whereas the lower ceilings prompting more confined thinking.

In one test, for instance, participants in the 10-foot room completed anagrams about freedom (with words such as "liberated" or "unlimited") significantly faster than participants in the eight-foot room did. But when the anagrams were related to concepts of constraint, with words like "bound or "restricted," the situation played out in reverse. Now the test participants with 10-foot ceilings finished the puzzles slower than those in the eight-foot rooms did.

Another experiment asked participants to identify commonalities among a list of 10 different sports. Those in the high-ceiling group came up with more of these themes, and had their themes judged more abstract in nature, compared with participants in the low-ceiling group. Meyers-Levy and Zhu suspect this outcome emerged from the psychological freedom that comes with taller ceilings—a mindset that might also enhance creative thinking.

Rooms with high ceilings prompt us to think more freely.

Altogether, they conclude in a 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, the research "shows that, by activating freedom-related or confinement-related concepts, ceiling height can be an antecedent of type of processing."

Ceiling Brain Scans

The new neuroscience study, led by Vartanian, had test participants look at 200 images of rooms while in a brain scanner. Half of the pictures showed rooms with high ceilings, half with low (below). Participants had an easy job: indicate whether they considered the room "beautiful" or "not beautiful." (The data actually came from an earlier study that looked at why our brains like curvy architecture, but were reanalyzed through the lens of ceiling height.)

Courtesy Oshin Vartanian

Little surprise, participants were more likely to judge a room beautiful if it had a high ceiling compared with a low ceiling. But the greater insight emerged when Vartanian and collaborators studied brain activity. They found heightened activity related to high ceilings in the left precuneus and left middle frontal gyrus—two areas associated with visuospatial exploration. The left precuneus, in particular, has been found to increase in cortical thickness after spatial navigation training.

So another part of the appeal of high ceilings seems to be that they capture our visual attention and engage our desire to observe our surroundings. Vartanian and company ruled out other explanations based on the imaging data, including the possibility that high ceilings simply put us in a good mood. That idea didn't pan out because participants looking at high and low ceilings showed no fMRI difference in brain regions related to pleasure, emotion, or reward.

The findings, reported in a recent issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, should be considered preliminary given the study's limitations. For one thing, the test couldn't control for factors besides ceiling height that might have led to "beautiful" ratings, such as the lighting or color scheme or curved design. And, of course, people weren't physically standing in a room with high ceilings, which could change the experience.

Higher ceilings activated the precuneus (left) and middle frontal gyrus—brain areas associated with spatial explortation.Via Journal of Environmental Psychology

But Vartanian says the research—in conjunction with the earlier work linking ceiling height and freedom—does add to our understanding of why people find high ceilings worthy of a real-estate premium.

"The combination of psychological and neural data can help us formulate a more complete picture of what is driving our choices," he says. "Knowing that people's preference for rooms with higher ceilings might be driven by the ability of those spaces to promote visuospatial exploration helps partly explain why people opt to live in such spaces, despite the fact that they cost more to purchase and maintain."

Furniture in the Garden: Windsor

George Washington's Windsor chairs, below.  




Shopping with a client yesterday, Atlanta's Merchandise Mart, something new, below.


George Washington would have been thrilled at their material, cast aluminum.


Cocktail table, above, dinner table, below.



Available in several colors.  Scaled to historical perfection, comfortable, light weight.
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Designed, manufactured by Three Coins Cast.  Beyond this you are on your own resourcing them.
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Finally, a new (old) silhouette for the garden.
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At the start of my Garden Design career, 3 decades ago, I knew I had to get clients outside, into their landscape, to ensure they wanted to install their Garden Design plan.  Plans included furnishing the deck/patio.  Ironically, a garden zone NOT included in my horticulture degree.  Paint colors, light fixtures, pots, etc.....too.
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You might like my Furniture in the Garden Pinterest board.  
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara

Ted Talk & Paid to Farm: Weight of Our Brain vs. Microbiome

“The three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you might be more important than every single gene you carry around in your genome...”  Rob Knight



 "And we've just over the last few years found out that the microbes in different parts of the body are amazingly different from one another. So if I look at just one person's microbes in the mouth and in the gut, it turns out that the difference between those two microbial communities is enormous. It's bigger than the difference between the microbes in this reef and the microbes in this prairie. So this is incredible when you think about it. What it means is that a few feet of difference in the human body makes more of a difference to your microbial ecology than hundreds of miles on Earth."

You're 99.99 percent identical in terms of your human DNA to the person sitting next to you. But that's not true of your gut microbes: you might only share 10 percent similarity with the person sitting next to you in terms of your gut microbes. So that's as different as the bacteria on this prairie and the bacteria in this forest."




"It turns out that our first microbial communities depend a lot on how we're born. So babies that come out the regular way, all of their microbes are basically like the vaginal community, whereas babies that are delivered by C-section, all of their microbes instead look like skin. And this might be associated with some of the differences in health associated with Cesarean birth, such as more asthma, more allergies, even more obesity, all of which have been linked to microbes now, and when you think about it, until recently, every surviving mammal had been delivered by the birth canal, and so the lack of those protective microbes that we've co-evolved with might be really important for a lot of these different conditions that we now know involve the microbiome."

Ted Talk, full transcript, above quotes, here.  Ted Talk, video, for talk, above.



More about children raised on farms healthier than those not, here.
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"The Government is Spending More to Train New Farmers Than Ever Before

Both veterans and under-resourced communities are top priorities."

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Did you know the age of the average USA farmer is... 58.3 years old?

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 “The USDA is very concerned about the continued aging of the American farmer,” Auburn says. “This program is part of a department-wide push to … keep the land under stewardship by people who care about it. It’s to have people interacting with their communities and to keep rural communities and economies healthy. It’s to have people out there interacting with consumers, who are increasingly interested in who it is who’s growing their food and how it’s grown.” 

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Education includes, "...raising poultry, sheep, and goats.

Annie Donoghue helps run the program along with her husband and project director, Dan Donoghue, and seven other partner organizations, which include USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the Farmer Veteran Coalition, the University of Missouri, and the National Center for Appropriate Technology.

Arkansas’ program offers free online courses in both English and Spanish, as well as hands-on, in-person public trainings and Armed to Farm boot camps for veterans, where participants learn the basics of poultry production, skills such as poultry-house building and even how to find appropriate markets for their businesses.

The program has been popular, as veteran-targeted education about this segment of agriculture was scarce. “There really wasn’t a lot of information for this group interested in poultry or small-ruminant production,” says Donoghue. “This program provides an opportunity for these veterans to consider careers in agriculture.”

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Full article,   The Government is Spending More to Train New Farmers Than Ever Before .

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Wendell Berry has been writing about the loss of farmers, farm habitat, farm communities, and collateral loss of human health & knowledge gained from agricultural living since the 1960's.  He says,  "Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty — the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Wendell Berry (Photograph: Guy Mendes)

There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair — done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.

Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much.

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.

For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness can forgive?

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments."

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Finally, the work of Andrea Wulf, Washington Post, review of, 

Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, 

           " In this lively and deeply researched history, Andrea Wulf (best known for her prize-winning chronicle of 18th-century English gardening, “The Brother Gardeners”) examines the botanical pursuits of America’s first four presidents. Those men were, it turns out, obsessive gardeners, but gardening was much more than a preoccupying hobby. It was central to their vision of the American republic. Jefferson and Co. believed that the agrarian life would safeguard the new republic’s virtue and that the future of America lay with the independent farmer. As Washington summed up, “Our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands.”

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More about connecting the dots of agriculture & health, here.

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Connection of agriculture & horticulture?  It is our generation, post WWII, separating them.  Prior civilizations knew they were inherent to survival, no separation.  What does this mean?  Agriculture crops can yield 80% more with proper pollinator habitat.  That, is money in the bank.  More, Berry lovingly narrates the decimation of land, family farms, rural communities across USA as industrial agriculture with its machines & chemicals have waged war against an unwitting opponent, us.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pics via my Pinterest: Changes Board .    Need to get the Farming article, top of this post, further afield.  Anyone needing a grant, the article has great links.  Changes Board?  Collecting pics of good gardens needing a slight tweak.  Will use them in my Garden Design classes.  

Front Door: Before & After

Lovely home, below, builder-special landscaping.




What, below, happened?



Adjusting eyeballs back into sockets, the before/after leave only questions.  Did new owners move in?  How much property for the site, for the front yard?  What does the backyard look like, too small, slope, etc?  Who's brilliant idea to treat the front yard as a back yard?  Painting the brick, yes.
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Every penny of this hardscape goes into house value.  Wooooowzzzzzza.
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Views from inside the home changed.  Lifestyle of the home changed.
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Historic garden design, nothing new.  However, totally new here.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics Page/Duke.

Vision Quest: Landscape for a Barn

Vision questing a barn this month.  Construction was completed recently, and without intervention it is already perfect.  Anything done must appear not-done.
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Large, it will be used for family events, and professional.  Cars, people, caterers, ease of use for all, without hindrance to views..
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Maintenance must be insignificant.
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Knowns include, hiding hvac/septic/trash, gravel, stone, meadow, ease of flow for cars/walking, large groups/small groups, social events/educational events, exterior lighting, meals en plein air, an impromptu lair for the owners,



An Irish landscape, above.  Stark, beautiful.



Simplicity, above, to the bone.  A bit of slope, perhaps add 'jewelry' with a stone wall, similar to the above using stones found on site.



At the doors, stone terraces, above, will keep most of the gravel off shoes, and interior vintage wood floors.
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Ina Garten uses hedges, below, at her barn.  I need to site the hedges to obscure the necessities, and allow 'flow'.  Must be deer proof & evergreen.



Need shade at the barn for outdoor meals.  Martha Stewart, used pin oaks at her barn, below.  Perhaps 2-4 oaks sited, just right, for a harvest table, and the tractor.


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Once the necessities are sited, gravel, stone, trees, hedge, flow, the barn is 'done'.  However, at that point, I'm open to adding a flourish, maybe a single espalier heirloom fruit tree, in the vein of Arne Maynard, below,
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Along with knowing lavender will be planted, and several types of self-seeding flowers into the meadows at the barn.
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This is the 1st salvo vision questing, next will be on site, alone for a couple of hours, then on site with the owner.  After that, we set it aside, let the left/right brain magic play.  Decisions made, then taken to the 'men' creating the literal landscape.  Their input, from a base of decades experience, filling out the full breadth of the team.  More changes.  Finally, a garden beyond measure, exceeding expectations.  Yes, exactly why I like working with a team.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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All pics from my Pinterest board, here.    

Garden Design: How to Handle the Car/Driveway

Beloved accuses me of being too wildly appreciative of the simplest elements of life.  Therein lies my wealth, is my response.
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Since the chicken coop massacre, a month ago, the pair of profoundly wounded hens are healing well. But, cannot get to their roost at dark.  Every evening I lift my girls to their roost.  This task enriches my soul beyond measure.  Merely thinking, 'I need to go lift my girls', as the chiaroscuro of dusk goes entirely black, makes my day.
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I keep a journal of pairs of words, and have begun noticing pictures insert themselves as pairs.  The latter due to Pinterest, for sure.  Favorite Pinteresting spot?  Claw foot tub, glass of wine, Pinteresting on my large galaxy note, cat sleeping nearby.  Ridiculous, my bad, told myself when the tub was put in a few years ago, 'no technology - only books.'  Lost the battle, joined the winner.




New landscape, above, with an old soul.  Adored, immediately, eyes locked/loaded, the car entry.  A lot of challenges in this landscape, myriad.  Each solution, a winner.  Why the car entry, so much?  Its location, scale, needs, necessities are each diminished, in abeyance to greater drama/importance, the front door.  Owner/designer got every layer right, including the 1st layer, William Morris's, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."   "The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life."
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I must know who you are at the curb.  Want to see, above, their interiors, art, books on the shelves, colors....  Garden design, above, is as beautiful in winter as summer/spring/fall.  Low maintenance & eco.



This garden, above, honors the car gods, and slab-of-concrete-god.  Parking court reigns supreme.  Front door?  Welcome, ye car.  Welcome, people?  When the annuals die, shrubs stop blooming, what's left?  
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There is power in awakening to,  "...genuine interest in all the details of daily life."  Aside from increasing property value, decreasing HVAC costs, above, this homeowner will have less stress/frustration with caretaking their landscape and increased pleasure/calm/peace/atonement once the epiphany arrives, my garden needs to be ME.
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An afternoon Garden Design class, using only these two pics, is enough.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Top pic, Cote de Texas.  Bottom pic, here.
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Bottom pic is common USA landscape story.  House built, builder landscape, keep for decades, done.

Zillow For-Sale-By-Owner: Success using Narrative

At the start of Downton Abbey, Ralph Lauren's ad, has a voiceover with a description about his design process.  First, he creates a story.
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Joy, I'm not odd, Ralphie does it too.  My garden designs each begin with narrative, a story.
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Story, for the life you want, not the life you have.  Jung's idea of having our outer life match our interior life.
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Cabin, below, I sold on Zillow, for-sale-by-owner, for a friend, last week.



(Lead photo, above, for vacation rental sites/Zillow for sale by owner.  Added this photo to Zillow Diggs for further exposure.  'BEFORE', pics at bottom of this post.)



('Eat-in Kitchen', above, is an asset in your listing, and 'life'.  Staged the drop-leaf table/chairs/cushions, cook books, wood cutting boards, small lamp, rolled the valence smaller at window over sink, gaining 10" extra views into the woodland.  Removed plastic cooking spoons & their plastic holder.  Wood cooking spoons & white ironstone canister from junk shops.  Added felt bottoms to all chairs/tables sited on wood floors.)

Before the internet, at a client's home, I gathered my stack of glossy 4x6 pics, the ones best matching her new story, aka garden design.  Before I could pull her story of pics she had walked into another room saying, "People would not get divorced if they......"
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Returning, she plopped down a scrapbook.  Continuing, "People get divorced because they don't honor what they have, keep no memories of their times together, awards they've won, note the milestones of love, honor what the other provides, pay tribute to losses, dwell in the successes of each other......."  (No, I don't remember her words in a quote but I do remember their intent, deeply.)


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She began 'showing' a Creative Memories scrapbook, above.  She was one of the first Creative Memories scrapbook sales associates in Atlanta, and its most successful, at that time.  Her home had been extensively renovated recently, and the new garden was being payed for with her Creative Memories income.
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Before leaving her appointment I bought a scrapbook & extra pages.  Within a month my portfolio was ensconced.  Until the internet, I brought that Creative Memories portfolio to each Garden Design appointment for years.  The start of my blog was solely for pictures to be available for clients.  Instead, it's more, bringing design & lecture work.  Who knew?
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(Fake Canadian spruce was on the mantel, above, staged it downstairs and placed native dried flowers on the mantel with art, a Cole Weston print from my mother-in-law.  Staging isn't about buying everything 'new'.)

The Cabin was for sale with 3 realtor companies, spanning 5 years, before I met the owner.  On his way to winterize, I asked to see pics.  Crime scene bad.  (Again, those pics at bottom of post.)
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A used mop, rotted firewood at the front door, every room arranged to  honor a TV god, not relationships.  Mountain views spanning 2 states ignored, no sign of love-laughter, nor interactions amongst generations, grandparent-parent-child-grandchild.  A guest book was in the living room for friends to sign, and the cabin had no scrapbook of pictures.  (Mounting metaphors, Jane Austen now has a cheshire cat smile.  A really good post soon, with Jane Austen's teachings, and a client's project.)
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No welcome at the front door, a narrative following into the bowels of the cabin.  Cheap extended-stay motels do more to say welcome.  "Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure."  Jane Austen.
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Lucky me, these egregious problems were easy to fix.
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From those first pics, I knew the narrative to create for selling the cabin.  And, bringing in money with vacation rentals until then.



(Custom made local mountain laurel, above, rails were hidden behind a sofa.  Easy staging change.  The cabin had no books or magazines, I made sure new magazines were always updated, and created a library for all ages, and sexes.  A vacation rental comment included appreciation for the good 'library'.  Perhaps my favorite complement during this process.  Another comment included disdain for the Scott single ply toilet paper !  Fine, we upgraded to the new softer Scott.  That was my favorite funny comment. Drink coasters were added to every side table, dresser, beside table.)
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Listed for-sale-by-owner on Zillow, the cabin sold in a year, go me.  Disclaimer, this was time consuming, hard work, and took every professional/life skill learned.  Along with a Tinkerbell attitude carried since before memory began.
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(Adirondack chairs, above, removed from porch, brought to newly created stone fire ring & placed facing mountain views.  Owner received a call from potential renter asking if there was a fire ring.  My bad, why didn't I think of it?  Owner had the fire ring within 24hrs.  She rented.  Stones, in the background, were brought from the owner's Athens acreage to contain new plantings. )



(Master bedroom, above, had dated brass lamps and bare walls.  Lamps & art staged.)
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The morning of closing on the cabin I awakened thinking about the new owners.  How the narrative of staging the cabin, shooting/listing, wrote them into existence.  Literally.  
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At closing I mentioned this to the new matriarch of the cabin, and asked what attracted her to the cabin from Zillow.  She said, "The pictures, especially the one from the bed in the master.", above.


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(All bedrooms have French doors with views into mountains or woodlands.  Bedroom #2, above, another king size bed.)


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(Bedroom #3, above/below, I chose a childhood theme with all the art, and added children's books to the dresser top.   Lamps were placed at every bedside in every room.   Final bedroom pic, above, showing French doors in each bedroom.  Dated brass lamps were brought to this bedroom, from the master.)



Underwater, however, closing the cabin wasn't too painful financially.  Vacation rentals carried the 'underwater' financial load, and with my Zillow for-sale-by-owner listing, zero realtor fee.



(Half way up the drive, above, welcome to the cabin.)

Several trips to the cabin removing staging items, and helping my friend.
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A bittersweet surprise.  His deep sadness, and some tears, at a cabin he thought would nurture his family for decades.  Time passes, children reach an age when 'the cabin' is not a desirable destination for more than a year at a time.  Expenses mount, an investment turns into a loss with 2008, workloads increase, and his times at the cabin become caretaking trips.



We mentioned these tears to the new owners.  They shared their own story of tears selling their family home, to buy the cabin, their full- time retirement home.
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Before closing last week, the evening of signing the first contract, my friend gave deeply from within, including in the prayer before supper, the new owners happiness in starting a new chapter of their lives, purchasing his cabin, may it bring every joy to them, their family and friends.  His eyes moist.
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Zillow is easy to use, for-sale-by-owner.  You'll especially like the weekly email metrics sent about people visiting your listing, in comparison to similar listings.  My cabin metrics, every week, were out of the ball park.  Which is horrible to a personality like mine, Tinkerbell.  Only 1 metric matters, 'sold'.
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Vacation rentals were easy, and successful, with the cabin, how I did it with AirBnb, VRBO, FlipKey, Craigslist, HomeAway, here.
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My friend saved an impressive amount of money with  skills learned on the job with garden design, curb appeal, interior design, writing books, lecturing across the country, working with clients.  He was a horrible client !  He was sure, "little ideas about moving furniture......", would not work.
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Back hand down the line winner.  A metric I adore.  Especially when a title is involved.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Update, 3-17-2015, an email from Zillow !  Copied at bottom.  Zillow did not ask me to write this post, nor provide this update.  I don't mind giving them more exposure because of the amount of money I made for my friend with Zillow.
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I have 2 friends locally, Atlanta, GA, successful realtors, in the business for decades.  (Connie Morelle, Dave Wagner.)  If either had been within the first group of sellers for the cabin, it would not have needed me, for sure.  Lake Burton, where the cabin is, has a strange economy after 2008.  Multi-million $$$ homes sell, anything less struggles, and is underwater.
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Owner of the cabin has a realtor friend, Athens, GA, still working in her 80's, wildly successful, and could have sold the cabin too.  Alas, our trinity of friends did not work the Lake Burton zone.  (Will update with her link soon.)
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 Metrics, for the cabin, from the local Lake Burton realtors were as low as the local Lake Burton vacation rental company.  Why?  In metaphor, those professionals learned of Creative Memories, without partaking.  They learned of the internet, without paying heed.  Those local realtors decided to kick & scream about the new economy & technology & etc.  Me?  I decided to have FUN staging & listing the cabin.

Kicking and screaming (vs. singing and dancing)

"Unfair things happen. You might be diagnosed with a disease, demoted for a mistake you didn't make, convicted of a crime you didn't commit. The ref might make a bad call, an agreement might be abrogated, a partner might let you down.

Our instinct is to fight these unfairnesses, to succumb if there's no choice, but to go down kicking and screaming. We want to make it clear that we won't accept injustice easily, we want to teach the system a lesson, we want them to know that we're not a pushover.

But will it change the situation? Will the diagnosis be changed, the outcome of the call be any different?

What if, instead, we went at it singing and dancing? What if we walked into our four-year prison sentence determined to learn more, do more and contribute more than anyone had ever dreamed? What if we saw the derailment of one path as the opportunity to grow or to invent or to find another path?

This is incredibly difficult work, but it seems far better than the alternative."  Seth Godin

The best story here?  Find success selling your home on Zillow, for sale by owner, creating a story.  No worries about the real story, create a better story.  I did.  SOLD.
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Before pics, crime scene photos, below.
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(Valence, above, was rolled tightly to expose more views into the North Carolina mountains.  Amazing fail, this shot.  Easily staged and became the lead shot for selling/renting the cabin.)

 (No story, above, this shot could be in a subdivision instead of 3+ acres with views of mountains spanning 2 states, and a winding wooded drive.  We asked the new owners, at closing, if they put shutters on the cabin, 'Please send us pics !' )

(Acres of woodland views, above, from the French doors behind those curtains.  No lamp at the bedside?  Who can sleep like that? Bare walls? )

(French doors with woodland views, above, and another wall of windows in this bedroom.  Again, no lamp at a bedside.  Really?  What was the professional realtor selling?  Warning, don't buy this house?  Met their goal.)

                                         
(Bedroom #2, above, has a wall of windows with woodland views, and another wall with French doors and woodland views.  This photo is a dereliction of duty. )

                                            

(Master bedroom, above, with a TV god.  No art.)

(Famous dirty mop, above, with rotted wood at the front door.  Adirondack chairs crowd the space, and when seated you have views of the parking court.  Easy fix.)

(Sofa, above, hiding miles of custom local mountain laurel rails.)

 (Kitchen, above, was a dark lonely place before it became an, Eat In Kitchen, for staging/selling.)
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Zillow note, mentioned above, From: Joe Sturgeon

Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2015 8:54 AM
To: 'TaraDillard@AGardenView.biz'
Subject: Zillow Inquiry

Hey Tara,

 
I work for the marketing team with Zillow, the online real estate network.

I ran across your piece discussing your success with the Zillow For-Sale-By-Owner feature. http://taradillard.blogspot.com/2015/02/zillow-for-sale-by-owner-success-using.html Thanks for the mention and congrats on the sale.

Would you consider pointing back to our Zillow Home Page as a resource to your users? Here’s the URL http://www.zillow.com/

We really appreciate your coverage and thank you for considering the link on your page. Feel free to use me as a point of contact here if you need any data or content in the future, and if nothing else, I’m just glad to have had the chance to connect! 

If this is not the correct contact would you please forward it to someone that can be of any assistance, thanks.

Cheers,

Joe Sturgeon Marketing Account Manager P 206.470.7065 C 206.719.0435 @joe_marketing Zillow

Flowers vs Structure

Thinking backwards, creates my career.  Supporting backwards thinking are the big box, many independent garden centers, websites, newspapers, magazines, flower shows, and etc.
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In amusement, at myself, former queen of backwards thinking, you will discover zero rapprochement here.
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Flowers.  Sex machines.  I've taught college botany, but that was much later in the game.
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You want flowers in your landscape.
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Your landscape wants structure.
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A decade of learning across continents & another college degree separates the previous 2 sentences.
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Structure?  Trees, shrubs, groundcovers.  Game on.  Choose for zone, sun/shade, across all bloom/berry seasons, hardiness against drought/flood/disease/insect, no need for chemicals/fertilizers/irrigation once established, little maintenance, siting to shade/sun the house, and attractiveness to pollinators, and destinations for dining, and pure redolence in the sublime, in atonement or a gathering.
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Structured landscape, below.




Flowers, give me flowers, below.  Have this garden if you want, below, but do not start with this garden.  Start with structure, above.



Adore this pair of pictures.
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I began, after college, gardening for amusement, above, after decades trying to get it right, top picture, I've learned a garden is about stewardship.  Better, stewardship is reciprocal.  Settle for mere lilies?  Place lilies in context, structure, they will take care of themselves/soil/air/insects/wildlife/beneficial bacteria-fungi.  Plant lilies first, and you've planted your garden backwards.
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This isn't an admonishment about not having flowers, it's a path to having them more richly, and easily.  Not only for yourself, but myriad layers you've yet to arrive upon.
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Garden & Be Well,        XO Tara
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Top pic from here.    Bottom pic via Pinterest.  Which garden is gone by morning, eaten by deer !   Truly, this pair of pictures makes me smile, and know I'm blessed to be living a life that kicked me out of the first layer.  Did I like every layer Providence gave?  No.  Check out my Quotes board on Pinterest.   Pure grace, and thanks, Providence decided to site the theatrics of my life in a garden & career much adored.

Wallpaper Choices Designed for Winter

Drapes closed, below, Garden Design.

Was this my intention?  Design my garden to interior design my home with the drapes closed?

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No.

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Another garden invention is born.

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Another proclamation from Providence, "You're doing it right."

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Later today, the sun will move upstairs, and fill the guest room walls with wallpaper, 'crape myrtle trees'.

Of course I want more.  A bird to fly across the drapes, land on a branch, and sing.

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Atonement is the unbidden word arriving as innate necessity.  Begun in my garden, enlarged by Nature, filling my home.  Nurturing, in ways unknown to be needed, when this began 3 decades ago.

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Vanishing threshold, home & garden in atonement, enlarged to a trinity, home-garden-spirit.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pics taken a few minutes ago.