HISTORIC DAFFODIL

Centuries in Europe before centuries in USA.

Want a tough daffodil?

Narcissus pseudonarcissus. Small yellow blooms, grayish slender foliage. Sometimes called, Lent Lily, for its season of bloom.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Sandra Jonas, landscape designer, has rescued thousands of these daffodils. They're naturalizing a woodland acre of her front garden. Their yellow heads were pelted down by rain drops. 4 hours of hard rainy driving to see her display. No pics except of the one I brought home, above.

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Couldn't get you good pics but the rains had no effect enjoying lunch in Sandra's antebellum home. She made stuffed shells using Tomato Earl's tomatoes from her summer garden, a spinach salad, rolls, tea. Desert was vanilla ice cream dressed with figs preserved from her summer garden too. It's ridiculous having no pics of lunch: food, dishes, table, room, daffodil bouquets. Susanne Hudson, Sandra & I had planned this day for YEARS. You know it was good gossip to make me forget pictures. But that's another type of blog entirely!

SIMPLICITY

This is my weakness: leaf litter mulch. No edging. Moss & lichens. Evergreen flowering shrubs. Petals on the ground. Patches of bare earth. Bench & bush. Low meadow leading to wildwood. Fragrance. Sound of wind thru leaves. Birds. Beauty.
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Do you know yours?
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic from Castle Renswoude Utrecht, Netherlands via It's About Time.

PLATES ON THE WALL

Thru ice, snow, wind my Spode, for over a decade, has survived nicely. Ha. I adore discovering others who like plates on the wall.

Gourmet magazine, almost 2 decades ago, profiled a French chef in her tiny hotel. Plates filled the wall behind her. Finally, last month, below, plates, almost 2 centuries old & stapled with lead found a wall in my house.

Plates on my walls outside, and inside. Vanishing Threshold.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Valorie Hart is Visual Vamp. Adored her blog before I saw her pic with the plates! She's been on my blog roll, at right, since my blog began.

DO IT YOURSELF & WOMEN

Often I will look deeply into my client's eyes, and say, "YOU do this, don't let the crew do it."

Picking up acorns, pulling branches together after a storm to use in a wattle, planting a pot or a few perennials & etc.

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One client's husband refuses to let her garden in the frontyard. He thinks it looks, "low class."
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How could society create such a man? Gardening is luxury. For women wanting to garden.

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Manly help is hired, above, for things I cannot do.

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Why is gardening potent to gardeners? Oxytocin & endorphins.

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Yesterday I stained a pair of cedar adirondack chairs bought at the Smith/Hawken going-out-of-business sale last fall. Several hours on a sunny, warm winter's day.

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Ha, got my oxytocin & endorphins along with a pair of newly stained adirondacks.

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This is exactly why I tell my women clients, new to gardening, DO IT YOURSELF. Not an admonishment, A GIFT.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Top pic, taken in January while hammering, with a spot of tea, the tile around my old tub. Theories about what was behind the tile wall & under the tub were discarded once I began hammering. Yes, called a man. Bottom pic, taken in December when my frontyard became a gravel terrace.

FORMAL + PSO

Deep winter dormant, I still know what this garden looks like. And why it works.

Formal hardscape: hedges & lines contrasted with chaos of plantings + informal tree trunks.

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Italians have cone shaped shrubs, with scruffy PSO's, behind evergreen hedges. (My favorite!)

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French gardens are quite rigid with evergreen hedging enclosing, oh let's say, tulips.

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Ah, the English. Evergreen hedges exploding with herbaceous borders & flowering shrubs.

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Take this style, evergreen hedge +lines + backfill plantings. Make it your own.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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PSO? Plant Shape Only!! Yes, more pics I took recently at Wing Haven.

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My garden began as mostly English. Now, it's Italian + English.

SMALL CONTENTMENTS

Wallpaper, 24 years old & still adored.The urge, energy & creativity to bring flowers inside, below, was absent for years. Blooms outside these windows every day, all year, no effort. Of course I must tolerate birds, butterflies or honeybees everyday too. Camellias, blooming outside, below. The brown? Dormant hydrangeas. The green? Azaleas. (Tara's Trinity of the Southern Garden: Azaleas, Camellias & Hydrangeas.)

Old wicker from an estate sale around the corner 3 years ago.

The cloche had been in the garden over 5 years, until hellebores were cut last week.

After 20 years, my house was painted. A decorator, Susanne Hudson, hired to help with colors & interior design.

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I'm basking in the joy, serenity & energy my new spaces are giving me.

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Above, When stamens drop, I'm taken out of time. (Lucky me, I think some people need cocaine to feel like this. As the Sea Witch in Little Mermaid says, "...Poor unfortunate souls........")

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What mentors have shared with me the most? Small contentments.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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That fabulous cloche? TJMaxx, $9.99!

PURE ROMANCE

Deepest winter, camellias in bloom, a pierced brick wall, a boxwood sentinal,

perennials peeking through, the dormant vine enticing me to come back.

This bit of garden, last week in Charlotte, NC, displays many desires.

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I want to know how to make cast stone urns, a pierced brick wall, forge an iron gate, paint a watercolor of this scene, write a poem about nature's delight & of course garden here.

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Perhaps this is why my contractor told me, "You are a gay man in a womans body." Ha, most of my girlfriends want to do these things too.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pic taken last month at Wing Haven.

GLASS POCKET DOOR

Why would she want a glass pocket door to the garden? The answer is clearly shown, above.
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Elizabeth Clarkson loved to roll her Steinway baby grand on the brick patio & play amongst her beloved birds.
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She left her home as a bird sanctuary open to the public, Wing Haven, in Charlotte, NC. Unintentionally, like Graceland, it stands as a time capsule of an era.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic via Wing Haven.

MISSION STATEMENT: Hank Williams

"Can you make people feel what you feel?" Hank Williams, below, asks,

in a song sung by David Allen Coe, below.

Whether you think so, or not, yourlandscape speaks reams about you.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics via Star Pulse

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Hearing Meryl Streep in , Out Of Africa, "If I know a song of Africa, does Africa know a song of me?" Realizing, via Hank Williams, the depth is in knowing a song of yourself.

SPRING IS EASY

This garden, below, gets it right. How do you know?

The bones (evergreen structure, axis, focal point, hardscape) hold together in deepest winter, above.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Top pic from Wing Haven. Bottom pic I took last week at Wing Haven, Charlotte, NC.

SOURCE

KARL LAGERFELD is a source for landscape design inspiration. (No, dahlings, I don't ask the gods why. I simply accept the gift.)

Cathy Horyn, New York Times fashion writer, equally inspires my landscapes.

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She wrote of Lagerfeld's work, yesterday, "But at its best, it means a wonderful sense of composition with random bits of history."
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Should any landscape aspire to less?

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics via Luxist

SASSY ATTRACTION

PUPPET BARBUDA adores sassy. Especially these poodle-puff-on-a-tail topiaries. Though plinths would be nice. Antique cobblestones, dear ones? The evergreen hedge? ODG. Improper pruning & voila a scraggly hideous dreadful ugly ridiculous base.
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Perhaps the pruner wears a polyester white leisure suit, a lightening bolt & TCB symbol on its back? PUPPET BARBUDA hears Elvis...."we're caught in a trap...." Exactly, the hedge is trapping this gorgous home.
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PUPPET BARBUDA would keep the hedge, moving it of course, pruning it properly creating dense evergreen lushness top to bottom.
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It's one thing to prune your own hedge, and screw it up, but PUPPET BARBUDA holds great contempt for anyone paid to prune this badly. It harms the reputation of her BELOVED LANDSCAPE INDUSTRY.
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Of course more but gotta go, PUPPET BARBUDA is busy this morning.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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ODG? Unbidden from the soul. PUPPET BARBUDA loves this house, in fact wants to live in it, yet the hedge, oh dear God.