Indigo Girls: You Can't See It, You Can't Hear It, We All Need It

 Garden Design is a series of negotiations.  Amazingly you think you're the negotiator.

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More than the sound of wind thru foliage is a Garden's thrum.

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"It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."  William Carlos Williams.  Best line about Garden Design, and pandemic, yet found.

 

   

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You'll discover the vital work of gardening; its planning, execution, caretaking, become the deepest, richest and strongest layer of life.  In and out of the garden.

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Gardens have always excelled in, "revealing people in all their laughable delusions."  Dan Chaon.  Several years into seriously creating a beautiful garden, and laughably failing, I  made changes to my education, self, and expectations.   

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"The act of translation is its own kind of meta; translation is a complex art......"  Sarah Neilson. Garden Design is the highest form of translation.

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Wisteria curtains, above, wish you could see them from inside.  Better, plant Wisteria 'Amethyst Falls' at your window.  Easier than Wisteria, plant Oakleaf Hydrangea and espalier.  Oh my the winter views outside through Oakleaf Hydrangea curtains.

  

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My subversiveness trinity: gardening, reading a poem, saying a prayer.  What is your subversiveness trinity?  You know, the one from your soul, not your elevator speech.

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Do you think he hears the rope, above, while swinging?  Probably.  In decades, he'll still hear this rope swinging.  Do you hear his rope?  I do.  And I can smell the Tara Turf under his feet as he walks away.

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Garden Design is thousands of years old.  Everyone behind us, is with us, as we are with this child, though he lives decades past us.  How do I know?  I hear it in my Garden, in Nature.  You know this, you hear it too, or you wouldn't have read this far.

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Gardening, "It's not about proving anything.  It's about sharing something." Yo-Yo Ma.

 

Pics, above, Tatler, here. 

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Love the wonk of the gate, above.  My gates all have wonk !

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Walk the path, above.  Do you hear it?  Walk outside, beyond the gate, do you hear your footfall?

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In the garden, alone, a barrier is crossed.  No longer alone, I'm not at all, it's only garden.  Garden & silence bring power.

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Emily Saliers, Indigo Girls, about going to a monastery, "It gave me an appreciation for the power of quiet in spiritual practice, which I think a lot of young folks ---or maybe I'll just speak for myself --- didn't really understand, well, what's the big idea about being a monk and going and being quiet?  What does that do for the world?  And it gave me a very keen understanding of exactly what it does for the world and for spiritual communities."

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"....an evolution of recognizing how sacred what is deemed secular is."  E. Saliers.

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"I didn't have an appreciation for simpler things that were proffered as much as I do now." E. Saliers.  

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Of course Gardens are not silent, yet it's their silence saving your life with Nature's oldest poetry.

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"....theologians --- they thoughtfully organized liturgy.  They put thought into constructing it so people might get the most out of it.   .....thought, and organization and structure....."  E. Saliers  Amusing, she's speaking of religion and its template is Garden Design.  

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It's the Garden's silence, you're wanting, as much as its meadow, flowers, trees, etc. 

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Garden & Be Well,   XOT

Dressing A Service Space

Color, vine, below, dress a service space.An easy fix, below?
An ornate black iron gate.

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A wood gate would harbor surprises: possum, snake, person.

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Would add 3 cobblestones at base of vine, keeping gravel away.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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A new home in Mixson, Charleston, SC.

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No space, none, is left undone in the best gardens.

GARDEN ROOMS

"So impertinent -- yet the house "did," for it was the home of people who loved their surroundings honestly."
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My garden is tiny. The gable, below, crowning my head while I type. Crepe myrtles for shade, fragrant tea olive crenellations along the cleyera hedge. (No grass it's my neighbor's frontyard!) "Italy is heroic, but Greece is godlike or devilish -- I am not sure which, and in either case absolutely out of our suburban focus."

My gate, below, delicately tucked into the hedge, always open.

A chair, below, just past the gate

in my potager. A room within a room. Studying in Europe many times yet, I travel farthest in my garden.

Near the chair an altar, above.

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"Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?"

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LOL, it is my garden explaining these things to me.

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Once, my garden informed me about a thorny topic, Tara dear your confidence is a masquerade for fear. A changed perspective allowing me to make a better choice and leave the fear behind.

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I'm never bored in the rooms of my garden.

My office window, above, overlooking a garden room. Do you think I ever see my neighborhood?

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I set out to create garden rooms and instead created a world.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Quotes from A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

3 Ways to Stage Your Table

Garden where you're at.  Be who you are.  Fake it till you make it.  Good enough, will stop at that trinity.  Already know not to force a solution. 
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Three years after moving into our ca. 1900 home on 5 acres we're still doing Daniel Boone gardening.  What does that mean?  Ornamental gardening is something for another day, probably another year, or two.
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ET-phone-home, exactly how I've felt.  And that little potted plant, wilting throughout the movie, until the end, when ET does go home, the plant returns to lush vigor. 
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Two years into no-ornamental-garden I began to sense something larger, Life.  The Life memo this time, Your field is being enriched, trust.  A stinker, feels like sinking, trusting this particular fallow field.  Excepting the creeping in of major new garden passions. 
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Go past many decades of US government intervention with farmers and their definition for fallow fields, you'll arrive at my fallow field, laying fallow to gather strength.  Trusting this 'gathering strength' feels woozy, the frenetic desire to phone-home-my-plant-is-wilting has been strong & enduring.  Thrust by Providence into a new life chapter.  Great sense of humor, dear Providence, considering who freely & with intention made the move from their beloved 30 year garden. 
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Another take on Dante's Inferno, finding myself lost in the woods, trying to get out, can't find my way out of the woods, yet it was me, taking the fullness of my days, years, walking into woods.  Not my first Rodeo.  Two questions to ask when you're stuck in the woods, looking at paths out, "Does this path enrich me, or diminish me?"     
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Odd new garden passion, staging garden tables in the florist style, below. 
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Staging this harvest table, below, is a twofer.  Aesthetics, and function.  Smart/witty siting huge pots/vases with greenery at zones unable to seat anyone due to chunky table legs.  More, the vignette of plants highlights those chunky legs as desirable, instead of a hindrance. 


Pic, above, here.
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Why not have a table, below, in the garden 'always' staged in Florist style?  Florist style, beauty with huge impact, little input. 

 
Pic, above, here.
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Finally, a table in the garden, below, staged as your life needs.  Not a fixed Florist vignette, above, nor the fixed tableau in the top photo,

 
Pic, above, here.
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Harvest tables, above, staged 3 ways.  Which staging is yours?
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Me?  All 3.  At 5 acres there is room.  One of the tables is merely laying about, at present, in pieces.  A large old wood gate from a shed we renovated, and old galvanized garbage cans, for legs, awaiting in the materials yard. 
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Garden & Be Well,  XO T
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Pic, above, here.

 
Pic, above, here.

A Gate In Croatia

She is Spomenka.  We call each other 'Sister'.  From Croatia, she has family there.

Sister sent me this last week, from Croatia.
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Sister knows EXACTLY what will pull heartstrings.  What is unique yet timeless.  Simplicity.
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And when we're together again, Sister's porch or my conservatory, she'll describe how this garden smelled, sounded, types of insects, birds, wildflowers,  temperature, humidity, a house nearby & more.  Sister will also tell me I was there with her.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara

'No' is Design's Important Tool

As designed, below.  Orchard wall & gate copied from centuries of history.  Why figs?  Huge, ancient, figs are nearby, using the design tool of repetition.

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A more important design tool than repetition I used, 'no'.

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You think a Garden Designer is hired to put things into your landscape?  The most important thing I do is keep things OUT of your landscape.

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'No' isn't only about simplicity/expense it encompasses impact-elegance-sustainability.  Beautiful historic landscapes incorporate the least amount of care creating the maximum amount of pollinator habitat, with aesthetics too.  Providence has huge wells of aesthetics, so it's allowed us too.  Grand canyon, Niagara Falls, Edisto Island, Alaskan sunset.    

At my desk, below, I listen to the site.  Every site speaks, I call the language 'gardenese'.  It's easy to tell clients, "No, that won't work because....."  Every client consultation is intense visually & listening deeply.  Their long list of desires must be edited.  I try hard to keep the deepest 'wants' using 'no' to get there which increases the impact.

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My favorite place to be, above, my desk.

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Drawing a garden's language.  Seeing, listening. 

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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara

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Pics at jobsite last month.  

Sojourns From Italy

At the property line, below, a hedge & faux gate. Look close, it's mirrored. Hints of an English cottage garden, below.

Double axis with a potager, below, viewed from the frontyard.

Potager, below, viewed from the backyard.

Little details, oozing water ball, abound, below.

There are no wrong notes in this Italianate garden.

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Surprised to see sojourns from Italy in the same garden as the previous post?

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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I knew, 20 minutes into the hour spent in this Italianate garden, it was a book. The owner, after my nonstop questions & pictures, finally relented to my rudeness and asked me into her home. Poppets, you know I had to see her Vanishing Threshold. ODG, garden views from inside her home are a day's worth of shooting.

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I would love, love, love to write & shoot the book of this garden.

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Beauty & something to learn on each page !!!!!!!

Choosing Wallpaper

In the bay window, below, at the front of my home, facing the street, tiny front yard, and several houses.

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Landscape design begins inside your home.

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Your realm doesn't start outside.

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Winter's tilt of the Earth, light hurtling through space, wrapping wavelengths tenderly around my garden, shooting as particles through the window panes, returning to wavelengths of light & shadow, seen perhaps merely in walking past, better, when there is lunch here with a friend, light & shadow caressing all they touch.
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This is all about you.  Choices.  How do you want to live in your realm?
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Lighting from the garden & views into the garden are interior design choices along with paint colors & wallpaper.
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Sacred vs. profane.  If you aren't making active choices in either direction, the choice is still made.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pic taken this week.   Set of chairs a great find at estate sale nearby years ago.  Tiger oak drop leaf gate leg table a  delightful find at local junk shop, now out of business.

For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

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NOTE to my gardening friends... look for changes to come. 

Knew before computers/cell phones, sitting in Atlanta traffic on way to a client, 'I must reach a larger audience with the same amount of effort.'   Soon after that epiphany I signed my CBS-TV, and, books contracts on the same day.

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Then I read an article in the NYTimes about something called 'blogging'.  Saved the article for a year before reading it.  Studied all the blogs they mentioned, hired a computer expert they quoted, and attended a blogging seminar.

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Blogging 2.0 has arrived, my knowledge is 1.0.  A believer in copying the best historic gardens across the globe it flows into every arena of life.  Watching Maria Killam grow her career/blog/life over the past 3 years made its impact.  Signed up  for a year's course with her blogging expert, Jon Morrow. 

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Changes will be slow, plodding is my adored method.  Pulling triggers here/there is spice in the mix.
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What do YOU want?

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Nothing is too small, too big, or too ego crushing to mention.

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Passion lies in sharing what has filled me to the depths of grace, joy & atonement, the best landscapes created over the last 2,000+ years.

Just so you know... 
 I  welcome your input.

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

House & Garden Well Matched

Perhaps not your cup of tea, below, but a perfect cup of tea nonetheless.  Deer proof boxwood, evergreen, punctuated topiaried forms amongst the green meatballs.  Low maintenance, drought proof, no bugs.  Amusing, the slight stone dry stack retaining wall.  Great thought went into needing/not needing it.  We see which won.
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Trees lovingly pruned, small space, several rooms & hallways & walls.
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Huge invitation to enter with the pair of urns, graced with stone steps.
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Have a seat in the parlor, chairs/fence using black makes the small spaces 'larger'.
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House used wisely as the backdrop focal point.  Incredible restraint with the house, great simplicity, dozens of choices made, each with the answer, 'No'.  Modesty of the entire package, house & garden, displays a wise heart.

"A garden is not a picture, but a language.", Henry Mitchell.


Pic, above, here.
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As time passes, above, I would prune the meatball hedges into simple hedges, no rounding, letting the rounded topiary shapes 'pop' more.  Better than my thoughts, it would be more fun being friends with this gardener, above, and enjoying it unfold through their head/heart/hands.
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Great joy in getting the call from a gardening friend, "I'm going to move that hedge by the house, and put a gate in the fence near ......"
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Irma update.  Hope it's the last.  Power came on last nite, att phone service came on while we slept, over 3 days without.  Beloved's team cleared, chain-sawed, raked, blew, etc. all yesterday.  We're back to a new normal.  Sunlight has changed with many large lost limbs, new scope for the imagination.  A Georgia Power team & a Tennessee Power team got our power restored, we're on the main drive in the historic district.  Side roads will get power today/tomorrow.  They had greater storm damage.

Forest Bathing

Nice sentiment, below, but too small.
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Long before cell phones, I knew what gardens provide.  More, I think tapping into my garden is what addicts hope to gain from drugs, alcohol etc.
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Going into my garden I forget what time it is, what day, hunger does not exist, and cuts/bruises are only noticed showering, later, when garden time is over.  Obviously, more than 'gardening' is going on.  Scientific studies are showing biological changes to our bodies taking place in gardens/Nature.  More than accounted for in placebo studies.
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Experiencing joy when time/hunger/Earth no longer exist is an experience of eternity here & now, says Joseph Campbell.  Do you experience this too, in your garden?  Wendell Berry takes these thought further.


Pic, above, here.

More than science proving Nature bathing changes us, I've noticed another strong change.


Pic, above, here.

Pace.  The pace of Nature & gardening are the pace of our bodies in relation to Earth.

 
Pic, above, here.

I do my best thinking, while in pace with Earth.  More, in that body/Earth pace, are the riches of eternity now.

 
Pic, above, here.


Pic, above, here.


 

More than myself, my home, above/below, must be bathed in Nature.



My home, above/below.





When I met Penny McHenry, she invited me to lunch the next day.  Driving into her property, above, my car was bathed, in hydrangea blossoms, both sides.
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Decadent blossoms, weighted & caressing & touching my car from front to back fender.
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More than meeting a new friend for lunch, already a gardener, I knew I had to have that.  Nature so abundant, cars, mine specifically, had to be bathed in blossoms.  Time passed, and without effort, or seemingly without effort, this desire became reality.
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If you've read this far, what is it you're wanting?
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Doing it?
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Hope so.  If not, why not?
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Focal Points in the Landscape

In your garden, below, your home is a big focal point. Your home says who you are, whether you think so or not. Consider: views into windows, paint color, shutters, vines/espalier shrubs on house walls, light fixtures, door hardward, roofing choices. All are focal points.

Peak of season hydrangeas, below, are the focal point. Winter? The table & ginger jar are focal points.

Choosing a color theme for furnishings in the garden is a focal point.

Paths, below, are always a focal point. Here, saturated with gate & peak of season blooms. Can you hear the crunch, below, of gravel?

When you buy a focal point ask yourself, "Is this so wonderful it will be fought over at my estate sale?"

Leave no aspect unconsidered in your landscape. An innocuous corner, above, at a garage with garden jewelry: vine, round downspout, dovecote.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Notes: 1 focal point/area, hence subsidiary focal points tucked into bushes. Balance plants for focal points vs. things for focal points.

Garden Designers Round Table !!!!!!!!!

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Today the incredible landscape designers, below, are each blogging on Focal Points.

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Enjoy.
Carolyn Choi : Sweet Home and Garden Chicago : Chicago, IL »
Debbie Roberts : A Garden of Possibilities : Stamford, CT »
Laura Livengood Schaub : Interleafings : San Jose, CA »
Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK »
Pam Penick : Digging : Austin, TX »
Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In the Garden : Los Altos, CA »
Susan Cohan : Miss Rumphius’ Rules : Chatham, NJ »
Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA »
Susan Schlenger : Landscape Design Advice : Hampton, NJ »

The Language of a Garden's Entry: Not What You Think

Are you aware there is a classic repertoire of garden design language?  You know, the one without words.

A witty welcome, below, shouting, 'Come in'.  Restraint, grandeur, provincial, elegant, color, while informing reams of information about the house and its owner/s.



The language of garden design is quite simple, contrasts.  Simplicity with decadence, rustic with formal.



Designing an orchard next to this garden room, above, is obvious or at least it should be.
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I've known this fact for decades, since 1st studying historic gardens across Europe.  Only later, much later, an embarrassing slug's pace, did the epiphany arrive, Providence never separated agriculture from ornamental horticulture.  They are entwined, they are one.
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Amusing, and sad, how many elementary school gardens are planted with vegetables & herbs, without their contrasting ornamental garden.  Why sad?  It is the ornamental garden adding up to 80% increases to agricultural yields.  How?  Pollinators.  Worse, the full language of a garden is not passed to the elementary school students, nor their teachers.
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Another way to look at the top pic and garden design?  Most often, in USA, a stone wall leading to an estate or high-end gated neighborhood is fabulously planted with a cornucopia of ornamental plants & monoculture lawn, everything irrigated, chemicaled, maintained.  Ironically, copying the best high-end apartment complexes.  Often, also, a piece of farm acreage purchased to construct a fine home, builds a couple of stone plinths connected with a gate then a few plantings tossed in.  Their new neighbors wondering, "Did that land sell-out to build a starter home subdivision?"  
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Oh my, the language of garden entry ways.
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Garden & Be Well, XO T
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Pics from NaramataBlend.

What Historical European Landscapes Can Teach Us About Our Own Landscape

Freshman year of college, aged 17 & having skipped my senior year of high school, I found myself in a cavernous classroom, with hundreds of souls listening to our puppet master gushing ad nauseam into the ether about macro/micro economics.  Except, for me, it was worse.  Little puppet master, obviously, held the secret to vast knowledge, yet his vocabulary was pure gibberish entering my brain.  Looking around, everyone else seemed to get-it.  Stress was building, my 1st college coarse, and knew the game was over.  Finally, I asked my closest amphitheater attendee, "What is a margarine, sounding like, 'marrghareen'?"  An hour spent locked on that word, nothing.  Smiling, she said, "Margin."  Decades later, it still amuses to think in terms of macro/micro.  A personal inner life joke.  How nice it would be to sit for an hour this afternoon listening to Little Puppet Master again, explaining the world's current banking & etc.
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Years after the macro/micro pairing, I locked onto another, sacred/profane.  Most recent pairing to make waves, amusement vs. stewardship.  (If you've ever locked onto a pairing of words.....please leave them in comments, I would really like to know !)      
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Moving on, into the macro about USA landscaping.  Lawn, foundation plantings, mulch, annuals, maintenance contract, fertilizing, insecticides, fungicides, irrigation, pre-emergents.



Pic, above, Pinterest.

With my starter home I immediately gardened as my father had, mowing, and, chemicals, faithfully, monthly, to kill bugs.  I'm not a rebel.  Within a year, I had stopped the 'method', I was trying to get pregnant.  Thinking to stop chemicals until the babies came.  The babies never came, infertility.  However, within 6 weeks of not using chemicals, to kill insects, I noticed I had fewer insects than when I was spraying to kill them.  Macro to micro.  I never used chemicals again, 3+ decades and counting.



Pic, above, Pinterest.

Within 5 years of zero chemicals, I had zero turf remaining.  Almost 3 decades without grass.  Recently moved to a ca. 1900 American farmhouse, there is no lawn, only meadow or woodland or gravel.  Studying the best historic gardens across Europe, it only took seeing 1 to know there is a template for landscapes, in the macro, trees/shrubs/groundcovers/stone focal point/low meadow cut at 2-3 heights/zero irrigation/no chemicals.
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It took designing/installing historic European style landscapes, for decades, to learn they are not merely about no lawn/no chemicals etc.  The agenda is much greater, pollinator habitat, and balancing the sacred/profane, into stewardship of Earth, community, self.  Amusing, I had accepted micro as macro for so long.
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Surprisingly came across a concise micro/macro about American agriculture in an article in The Guardian,  about Edward Luttwak, " Military strategist, classical scholar, cattle rancher – and an adviser to presidents, prime ministers, and the Dalai Lama. Just who is Edward Luttwak? And why do very powerful people pay vast sums for his advice? "
“Most people live such pointless lives,” said Luttwak as we walked toward his gate. “Not desperate lives – they have cable television – but pointless. For politicians, it’s not pointless, but it always ends in disappointment and bitterness. But meaningful? Their lives are not as meaningful as the Mennonites. The Mennonites are free in the Hegelian sense – they are self-consciously free. And they have unintentionally revealed the ongoing fraud of American agriculture. They don’t destroy the land, they don’t drug animals to death – they make vast profits using 18th-century technology. Personally, I cannot live that life, but I want it to flourish. I relate with Ulysses because I demand an interesting life. I demand it.”
Full article, The Machiavelli of Maryland, here.
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Bunny Williams home, above.  Her garden resonates, it's the historic template, yet more.  Obvious she has demanded that her life be interesting.  Her book, An Affair With a House, is one of the few I tell my clients to purchase.  If you learn best via photos, her book is for you.  It's about interior/exterior, vanishing threshold.
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Bottom line?  What kind of landscape do you want around your home?  The landscape of your heart, that makes you smile, or one fitting in with the neighborhood?  Choose in the macro.  Then follow the micro templates of your choice.
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How do you choose in the macro?  Pinterest.  Create a board of pics for landscapes you love.  Don't stop the board until you have at least 100 pics.  There will be a thread amongst the pics, and your landscape will be that thread.  Promise.  Macro, create your Pinterest board, micro, deduce the thread from your Pinterest board.  More than putting in a landscape you'll be creating an interesting life.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Intimacy In Large Spaces

Moments of intimacy are designed into this home on acreage.

 Human scale, framing vistas, entries & etc. using materials with patina.

Plantings: tough, beautiful, fragrant.  Feeding the soul, and served at table.  Soon, an iron gate will ask you to enter here, above.
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I want her to look at her acreage and love all she sees.  No matter the season.  Never look at her beloved land and think, "I must do this, that must be done, that's a mess."
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pic taken recently.  And small landscapes get the big vista treatment along with intimacy.  Must remember this for posting, a little landscape and one with acreage.  Amazing how they both 'live'.

Fencing: Contrast Formal + Rustic

Garden Design uses contrast as a potent tool.  If I could only have 5 arrows in my quiver, contrast is one of the 5.
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Contrast, everything.
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Fine country estate?  Rustic fence, below.
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Why?  More layers of narrative.  More metaphor.  A deeper story.  Intellect playing in grace.



Rustic fences, below, with fine manor houses?  Centuries of examples.



Charming, below, welcoming.  Formal fence, below, instead?  Fine.  But you've just created a 'walk-thru', get where you are going don't stop statement.



Elegant roses, rustic fence, below, is wicked.  I smell the fragrance.



Rustic, yet looks formal, below.



Rustic, reading formal, below, with the black stain.



Formal, reading rustic, below, with hog panel wire.




A little privacy, below, historic lattice.  

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Beloved & I are building a deck at the back of our American Farmhouse.  We chose the formal reading rustic with hog panels.  We didn't want to block views of  softly rolling hills/open-wooded/lake/sunsets, yet needed a hint of elegance to bind to the house, while honoring the simple livestock barbed wire fence along a property line with dairy cows.  Contrast.  Need 1 panel of the lattice, above, with our railing.
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All day yesterday we were building the new deck, just the 2 of us.  At our age.  Go us.  Late in the daylight, a ribbon of black birds flew over, the ribbon must have been a mile long, and they were all talking.  Haven't seen/heard anything like it since childhood.  Sunset was a stunner.  Having lived in subdivisions my entire life, without seeing sunrises/sunsets I'm easily distracted by a good sunset.  Hints of the Milky Way too.  More days ahead, working on the deck around the day job.  Soon we must decide roofing for portions of the deck and screened room.  Hard choices, not wanting to block sky views, yet getting protection from summer sun, and mosquitoes.
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All pics linked from my Fences Pinterest Board.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Made the choice to build ourselves, and save $5,000+.  Beloved already had the know-how & tools.  Huge.