Designing the Faux Path

Many times I've used a bit of woodland, buffer between neighbors, as a faux focal point. Occasionally, space allows for this much meandering path, below.  Most of the time, the path is a few steps leading to a faux gate.  In each interpretation the path is 'real'.
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In the moment, below, Nature's yearly leaf fall.  Took me an ancient amount of time to realize, the trees are fed and enriched by letting go.  And the same is true for us, if we'll let go.  During senescens the color of photosynthesis is lost, and the true leaf colors appear.  Another story written in plain view, by Nature, another metaphor.  Beauty in letting go.  


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Pic, above, here.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

3 Layer Garden Design

An excursion, below, that should be a destination in Garden Design.



Pic, above, here.
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Using the 3 elements, above, of garden design, plan your garden.  A serious landscape, in vanishing threshold with interiors of your home, expanding lifestyle, all with ease, beauty, joy while amplifying your personal aesthetic.
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Don't know the 3 elements, above?
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Ceilings, walls, floors.  Put another way, trees, shrubs, groundcovers.  Another description, foyer, dining room, living room.  Yes, now you are seeing the trinity of elements in the design, above.
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Two types of ceiling, above.  Can you label both?  Sky & trees.  Three types of flooring, above, low meadow, gravel, a chevron pattern.  Three types of walls, tall shrubs, medium shrubs, contrasting texture shrubs.
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Pond is a nice focal point viewed from the foyer, yet equal in use to both living room & dining room.  .
Focal point on plinth, on axis with don't-know-from-this-pic.
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Never thought about a garden like this for your home?  This garden will take your further, faster, lasting longer, than most other types of gardens.
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Starting and ending points for this garden remain 180 from a garden beginning, "I want hydrangeas, peonies and..."
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T

Window View is Your Life View

“The Soul selects her own Society.” 
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems
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Inside/outside narrative.  Vanishing Threshold, below.
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Recognize her window?  Emily Dickinson.  A recreation at New York Botanical Garden.


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Pic, above, here.
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A salesman called, about 15 years ago, selling vinyl double paned windows.  "How could Emily Dickinson have written her poetry with those windows?", I asked.
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Now, the science & math are available for keeping historic windows vs. replacing with new double paned windows.  Adding storm windows to historic windows creates less energy loss.  Greater money savings.
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Alas, the divide of souls knowing this inherently in their DNA vs. those who will never get it, is well beyond to the moon & back.
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Young man selling the vinyl double paned windows?  He did pause.  Then resumed his scripted sales pitch.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Vanishing Threshold: House & Garden

Vanishing Threshold, below.  Interior & exterior, married.  The full monty.



When a client hires me for the garden, if needed & it's within my scope, I design interior spaces too.  What does that mean?  I know my scope.  Outside, my scope has no restrictions.  Inside, my scope is sourced off-the-shelf, antique shops, thrift stores.  Inside, if special order stone, textiles, furnishings, removing/adding walls, are the playing field, I have an incredible interior decorator on my team.
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Yesterday's jobsite, 60 of the most beautiful acres, streams, meadows, woodlands, gracious sloping views, in the last of the Piedmont before turning into Coastal Plain, are not a challenge in the least to Garden Design.  Thorn on the acreage?  The house.  A ca. 1980's ode the Bee Gee's named aptly, Stayin Alive.  Who wants to merely stay alive?  Thriving is the choice.
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Working with the interior decorator on this project and the homeowner has been quite a team.  There was an obvious wall removed inside, then magic, the interior decorator added a wall to an area I would have never 'seen', yet once designed, of-course-the-wall-must-be-added.  In return, I knew the front porch had to wrap the house, creating a new heart to the home.  Interior decorator never 'saw' wrapping the porch.  Indeed, we are a happy team of cheerleaders for each other.  In addition to giving/teaching each other a new 'eye'.
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Drawing, above, sums up having a home.  Vanishing threshold.  House & Garden.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Pic, above, drawn by John Tackett.

Just Let It Touch

From the 80's, I've noticed, this focal point conceit, below, used in magazines & books.
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Just let it touch.



Pic, above, Here.
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If you can't just-let-it-touch, perhaps add a small leafed ivy to clamber your focal point a bit.  Though it could easily be a clematis too.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T

Interior: A Reverence for Nature

"A reverence for Nature...", is how the caption begins in Architectural Digest, for the pic, below.



Pic, above, here.
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Pic, above, here.
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Pic, above, here.
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Stewards of Nature seem to be sprinkled lightly across continents, and eras.  How odd to be finding each other through this thing named, Social Media.
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Pic, above, here.
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Adore how they think, top pic.  Their foyer a full narrative.  Their garden a vanishing threshold with the foyer, more pics here.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO T

Mix Matched Outdoor Furnishings?

Layers of narrative, below.  Color echoes a home run, for starters.  White to silvers, very nice.
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Curiosity too.  Hydrangeas, below, at left in foreground, then further back, to the right.  A photographer's styling?  Perhaps a stylist guiding a photographer?
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Did your mind go there at all?  The white hydrangeas merely props?
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Hardly the 1st thing I saw in this delightful pic.
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First thing?  Field gathered furniture, all painted same color.  Voila !
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Studying historic gardens across Europe for decades it was France teaching me that trick.  No worries about field gathering garden furnishings.  Paint them all the same color.
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Huge arrow in your quiver.



Pic, above, here.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Almost a complete garden design course in this pic.  Canopy/understory trees, high/low density, scale, flow, focal point, simplicity, color, contrasts, repetition, ceiling/walls/floors, seasonal interest, winter structure, invitation, comfort, myriad uses, no chemicals, low maintenance.

Porch Furniture

Met with a client yesterday, we did their backyard 2 years ago, and she needed a quick hour.  Several topics.
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Last topic, her small front porch.  Garden catalog in hand, tape measure pulled to dimension, blue tape marking chairs/sofa feet.  Where exactly should the sofa/2 chairs be placed?  About to answer, she quickly said where her 11 year old daughter told her, "Mom, they have to go like this."  Great moment, exactly what I was about to answer.  Not the 1st time this child has said intuitive things about the garden.  We've got our eyes on her !
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Perhaps the most surprising & delightful outdoor seating, below.  Those scallop topped barrels, the folding screen, the hard-packed dirt flooring.  Is it a private home?  A small hotel?  What kind of trees are in the barrels?  Why is the screen there?  Is there anything behind the screen?
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Woman, front left, seems to be texting.



Pic, above, here.
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When I worked at a garden center in the 80's we would get an order of 1/2 whiskey barrels 1/year, sold for $11.99 ea.  Unloading them from the truck, fumes so strong, we felt like we could get drunk by osmosis.
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I was a total snob about those whiskey 1/2 barrels until I saw George Washington had used them at Mt. Vernon, and a pic of Rudyard Kipling in India standing on a gorgeous porch, several 1/2 whiskey barrels planted.  Now, these full whiskey barrels.  Yep, suitable for our ca. 1900 farmhouse.
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Garden & Be Well,  XOT

Needing my Tribe

In our ca. 1900 American farmhouse for almost a year.  Mostly a slow year excepting it was mostly a fast year.  Haven't found the new normal yet.
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Have begun finding my 'tribe'.
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Don't know if you really want to know this 'tribe'.  We garden as answer to anything life throws.  Anything.  It's the garden.
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"  Work hard in silence, do what you have to do, and ignore the drama and negativity surrounding you.  Let your success be your noise. ", from Marc & Angel.


Pic, above, here.
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My vocation is creating gardens, contracting their installation, lecturing, writing books, my avocation is my garden.
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The tribe of women, I'm gratefully joining, locally, already deeply humbling me.   People have real lives, and this means roses with sharp thorns.  Lightly, they share those thorns, as air.  They mentor by living.  They live by digging.
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Hope you've already discovered Marc & Angel, and of course, your tribe.
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Garden & Be XO T

Garden Design: Flying Buttress

About 3 weeks ago we installed a pair of flying buttresses in a potager I designed.
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Choosing an evergreen shrub, then sourcing it in 3 different sizes proved impossible locally, state wide, region wide, and flyover country wide.  Finally, sourced on the west coast.  It's the new normal sourcing plants for real gardens.
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Flying buttresses were not part of the college curriculum for horticulture, in USA.  Of course I discovered them studying across Europe for decades.  1st garden in 1st country toured, literally.  No one seemed to have a name for them, nor did any of my peers seem as excited about them as I was/am.
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Their use, below, quite apparent.  These, below, are the high end of fancy.



Pic, above, here.
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Evergreens, above, pay the rent (for me), the herbaceous perennials do not.  Peaking for a mere 2 weeks/year, deadheading, dividing, weeding, staking, blank in winter.  Nope.  Instead, I would fill their space with flowering shrubs, a succession throughout the year, and bulbs.  Perhaps a lone flamboyant Clematis roguchi clambering a single buttress, as it dances with sunlight.  Yes, now I'm pleased, and amused.  With no down time & significantly less labor.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T  

Starting Point: Petersham Nursery

A commercial project, currently, has multiple narratives.  Sited in a historic building, the master plan includes antiques vendors, pop-up shops (my suggestion), restaurants, garden shop, entertainment, private event weddings/parties, a resident gardener for livestock & potager for supplying the kitchen (my suggestion).  Goats are needed for this job.  Tethered in a new spot daily, Jamaican style, to control kudzu & mimosa seedlings, you know this one is my suggestion, later they can be on the menu, pasture fed goat curry.
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At the front of the site is a section of 1-story granite with several entries boarded up, soon, opened with glass doors, and a nursery bursting with at least a plant or gardenesque antique you must have.  For the nursery I've suggested box lunches for sale, the restaurant is in another section of the building, close by, and quite stunning, even now, ahead of renovation.
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For the nursery, there is only 1 template, (in my mind) Petersham Nursery.  Perusing online materials for Vision Questing the myriad layers of my section of the project, exterior cohesiveness, grading, parking lots, are not 'romantic' lets take a photo yet, Petersham was a greater delight than expected.  Owners of my project have decades of success in the hospitality industry, among other credentials.   I know they'll pull from Petersham's success, and stamp their own country/continent success onto it.      



The ubiquitous Welcome Table, above.  Well done, their ubiquity never tires.



In the greenhouse, above.  Part of a team, it will be interesting to see our finished product.  Of course my Vision Questing letter to the team included choosing a color trinity for the exterior, and fonts for signage outside.  Going 'blind' into this at the moment, I have not seen the marketing expert's choices.  I know their work, and know I'll adore their choices.



Have used this pic, above, before on my blog.  Unaware it belonged to Petersham.  At the front end of my garden design career, 3 decades ago, I did not like the garden style, above.  Then the decades of traipsing Europe studying historic gardens.  Learned, after studying at Great Dixter, the garden design style, above, is well trod for centuries.  Of course I've used this template !  Not merely because it is delightful, more, it is low maintenance with visual beauty 24/7 year in/out.  Simple.
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Aside from the landscaping, above, the architecture we are working with has sections of amazing similarity.  A long blank wall, in our project, red brick- 1 story- flat roof, with a strip of soil 2' wide and a sidewalk 3.5' wide, by the street, I've designed espalier pear trees underplanted with herbs/bulbs/self-seeding annuals.




Pic, above, Petersham Nurseries.

Hope chickens can be apart of this project.  4 years, now, having my first chickens, and they've been marvelous everyday.  Dowager Duchess of Devonshire has nothing on me when it comes to loving my chickens.  Excepting, she had them decades & decades longer.  Ironically, it's the client hiring me for this job, I did their residence, whose chickens first educated me about chicken keeping.



Pic, above, here.
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I worked at a propagation nursery-garden center-florist for several years in the 80's.  Love the carts we had at both garden center & florist.  This commercial project must have a cart at the nursery !  Painted 1 of the trinity colors, in my proposal.  Touring dozens of historic gardens across Europe, the garden cart was at several.  Another garden design idea to copy, commercial/residential, manor house/gardener's cottage.



Pic, above, here.

2 garden carts, above.  Reminds me of Susanne Hudson's maxim, Dinky is Stinky.  Overdose on a theme is mine.
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More about this project soon, The Potager.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Susanne called recently, she's flying to Connecticut & driving straight to Bunny Williams house for  a garden sale & tour.....    Told Susanne she must take zillions of pics, and call me everynite once she got into bed.
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Another recommendation for our project, it must have lodging.  B&B is fine.  A destination food/shopping venue in USA different than England, distances much greater.

Last Question of Garden Design, "What Plant Goes Here?"

Often, it's not the garden needing a new design, it's the house.
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"How many French doors are they getting?", is the common joke question from my team when I get a new client.
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Two bays & a French door added, below.  How could they not be there?
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Pic, above, Ben Bentreath, who captioned it, "I designed the stone bay window which we built five years ago - turning an otherwise dark room into a much lighter space that connects into the garden with a huge south facing bay (and making a tiny upstairs bedroom a lot larger at the same time)... a simple but effective extension. It's mellowing in nicely now."

Vision Questing a commercial site with a new client, (actually new project - old client), it is obvious the long-long-long cluster of buildings built in different eras will need several pairs of urns atop several pairs of corners.  Cannot wait to source the urns to their proper era for the buildings.



"What plant goes here?", is the expectation.  Plants are the last to be Vision Quested in garden design.
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Having a 'real' life means I'm sometimes stuck in social situations with prototypical Earthling's, you know, zero care for Nature.  If they discover what I do for a living the 'landscape' around their home pops from their mouth, with the ubiquitous finale, "What plant should I put there?"
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Their question, I have no answer for.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T