Sunday, March 8, 2009

ECO-WATTLES

Eco-wattles are a landscape feature hard to photograph, difficult to describe & challenging to write about. And you want them!!

Eco-Wattles are landscape debris pulled together in serpentine shapes. 3.5' wide at the base, tapering to 3.5' tall. Don't haul off leaves, branches, grass clippings, prunings or your Christmas tree. Use Eco-wattles along woodland paths. Blow leaves off to the side and the wind can't blow them back. Above, my eco-wattle prevents neighbor's leaves from blowing into my woodland walk.

Everyone balks at eco-wattles until they see them in person. Above & below, line of brown is the eco-wattle.
I've created 2 types of eco-wattle: formal and informal. Informal eco-wattles have all sorts of garden debris. Formal eco-wattles have 1 type of garden debris and they're pruned neatly.
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Eco-wattles: reduce maintenance, provide winter butterfly habitat, lead the eye aesthetically, enrich the soil, and more.
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Mary Kistner, client-friend-mentor, grew up on an apple farm in upstate New York over 8 decades ago. She used eco-wattles on her 25 acres in Snellville, GA. Her land is now the Kistner Center, given to the Piedmont Land Trust when she died.
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I took her idea and have applied it to residential landscape design for 15 years. No one else has been doing this. Why?
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Mary Kistner got a job designing window displays for the largest department store in Atlanta during WWII. It had been a man's job and of course she had the job much longer than the war lasted.
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XO Tara



Saturday, March 7, 2009

CORPORATE WOMAN & HER LANDSCAPE

CORPORATE WOMAN had to meet on a weekend, she's always at work. From her address I knew she wasn't far and the homes are charming brick/stone from the 1930's. Three steps into her frontyard she burst through the frontdoor to greet me. Within moments we were holding hands, fingers entwined, entering her foyer, below. CORPORATE WOMAN makes cloche gardens, above, to relax. She makes a limited number each year and sells them all.
CORPORATE WOMAN is eclectic, likes still-life, ivory ironstone, old pitchers, sterling. I adore having clients with sure interior design taste. It dictates landscape shapes for garden rooms, paths, and lawns. With quantities of antique white ironstone it was obvious CORPORATE WOMAN will have oodles of white flowering shrubs, trees, & vines in her landscape.


CORPORATE WOMAN decorates with nature. The petals, above, falling from an arrangement of branches she forced into bloom. Mental note, CORPORATE WOMAN wants a landscape to use as a cutting garden.

Talk turned to food. CORPORATE WOMAN sent me home with Ina Garten. Her favorite landscape picture, above, will be her landscape. Now, her landscape is overexposed.
We spent a couple of hours on the swinging bed, above. Conversation? CORPORATE WOMAN single handedly put the HIP in hippie. A confident life supporting herself, raising a son, moving on from toxic men, marriages, jobs. She'll be in Italy this summer, with BELOVED & SON, for 2 weeks. SON, graduating college this year, continues in Europe another 2 weeks. A gift from CORPORATE WOMAN.

Focal points, subsidiary focal points, garden rooms, paths, terracing, trees, axis are already in CORPORATE WOMAN's landscape. And they're well done. Something's missing, the landscape isn't working.
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Evergreen walls. Her landscape falls apart without them.
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In addition: one pathway will be changed from a 'V' shape to a 'U' shape, focal points will be repositioned slightly, a few 'cute' things will be removed, sheets of ivy removed, a friendship gate to her neighbor's garden will be built and a viewing terrace added at the back of her property overlooking a woodland park and cemetery.
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I know I'll be swinging on the hanging bed again with CORPORATE WOMAN. Perhaps I should have taken the offered wine and then blogged. Darlings, there was some hot, hot, and hotter talk.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Friday, March 6, 2009

SLEEPING WITH FARROW & BALL

Falling asleep the past 2 nights reading the new Farrow & Ball color chart. Exhausting delight. Imagining color combos with shutters, patio furnishings, trim, frontdoors, arbors & etc. THEY, yesterday's client, have a new house in an old neighborhood.
Shutters in their breakfast room are usually closed due to the view of the carriage house, below. Solution? I designed a pair of French doors, iron balcony and jasmine 'Madison' to climb and soften.

Their covered porch, below, exposed to the neighbors. Behind the chairs I've designed shutters, sconces, sofa table, pair of lamps, and an ottoman for the chairs. The floor will be stained 2 tones darker than the house trim and a sisal rug will be placed.

The stacked wood wall, below, has got to go. Until then it will be stained the trim color of the house.
A stone wall will be built with a modest column for an urn. Across the street, below, is the type of stone wall their landscape needs.

Changing the subject, below, yesterday's lunch on the well-placed chair. Remember what the chair looked like 4 days ago?

Yes, snow, 4 days ago. Atlanta has crazy weather. It was zone 7, now zone 8.

Bought the footstool, below, with thoughts of paint & recovering. It's been in my garage for years.

Brought it into the house yesterday and discovered a note pinned to its bottom.


Horse hair and excelsior stuffing, maybe original? I googled the names on the note and found one of them. Will sleep again with Farrow & Ball deciding on a color.

I have a footstool fetish. Anyone else?
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Why the disparate mix of topics? They all happened yesterday. Are your days this sublimely variable? Tears yesterday also. I found a disc of pictures, several years old. Pictures taken in Penny's garden, Hydrangea Heaven. Friend, mentor, travel companion, compatriot in crime, lecture partner, and too long gone from this Earth.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Thursday, March 5, 2009

A LANDSCAPE TO MAKE HER CRY

"The Renaissance had a word for it: sprezzatura, the quality of apparent ease that the perfect courtier brought to all his high-wire acts: swordplay, flute-playing, poetry-writing, singing, love-making." Willard Spiegelman

SHE called me to design her landscape. Her sprezzatura lost momentarily with a previous designer.
At the frontdoor natural light and her books. SHE, "When the Barefoot Contessa sashays into her garden I swoon."
SHE called me to fix what others created.

SHE & my contractors, don't you love the body language? In her hand is my plan, fixing those walls.

String & flags to make the plan come alive. Below, SHE has a potager to sashay into.

Yellow string, above, being measured for the stone to create raised beds for her potager. Paths of small gray granite gravel to match her bluestone terrace.


SHE had boots ready to walk in the mud. SHE recently rescued Sam, below. Can you tell he already has her heart?

Talk went to wine & scotch.


SHE was dubious about the Giardino Segretto garden room. Until I said, It's where you'll drink scotch & wine with your girlfriends. Sold!

Colors, furnishings, books, lighting. SHE chose them all.


One of my landscape design secrets is to see which cookbooks are in the house. Why? They are a window into the soul. How you eat is how you live, and how you garden.


Interesting. SHE has 2 glass/metal tables. I copied the idea for enclosing a portion of her bluestone terrace. Using a mid-century modern greenhouse glass roof & folding door idea used at Callaway Gardens, Sibley Center.


An entire closet is devoted to dishes.

When I made the 2nd appointment, to draw en plein aire, I requested lunch.

Another landscape design secret, talking life. Knowing there will be a defining thought.


SHE went back to the Barefoot Contessa. "Every recipe of hers is foolproof. No matter how I forget to do something, don't quite beat the egg whites correctly, anything. Nothing I've cooked of hers, through the years, has failed."

Can there possibly be a better description for the type of landscape SHE wants? SHE's not afraid of wit. SHE's never cute.

Beautiful, foolproof, light & shadows, traditional spiced with mid-century modern, flavored with the Barefoot Contessa & the great works of literature. That was the landscape I had to design.
LANDSCAPES BEGIN IN THE IMAGINATION

A plain chair with a pop of fringe tells me more about designing her landscape.

SHE's not afraid of sunlight on her floor & furnishings. Telling me SHE's sensual.

And another landscape design secret, the guest bathroom.

SHE has drama with color, textiles, art from her travels and junking. A directive for any landscape.
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SHE's ready for her landscape to be DONE. Troubles with her 1st designer weigh heavily in time & money.
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Wish I could have an 18-wheeler show up today with everything in my plan. I know I've created a landscape to make her cry.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

YOU OWN THE SKY

LOOK UP & LANDSCAPE THE SKY. Questioning my sweet little garden a few hot, polluted summers ago,
WHY DOES THIS TINY LANDSCAPE CREATE THE FEELING OF INFINITE SPACE?

How can a landscape be tiny when it has the sky?


Technically you're looking at ceiling, canopy, understory, walls, floor....my garden room.
My garden life. I'm stealing-the-view. Some of the trees aren't on my property.



No matter the season.
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See the little birdhouse in the top pic? Cone shaped at the top it directs the eye upward too.
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It's an iron birdhouse from TJMAXX, on sale, near New Orleans, when I lectured at one of their parish libraries. After Katrina. Every chair filled. You should have seen their eyes. This audience that had lost so much. Their eyes full of excitement about doing something happy.
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Their landscapes were 'dragged off'. What does that mean? I didn't know either.
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After Katrina, equipment came into yards to remove fallen trees. As the trees were 'dragged off' they pulled away every bush, groundcover, perennial. Landscapes devastated by the storm were completely decimated by the clean-up.
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So many stories the news never covers.
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Anyway. Landscape your sky. It's been a tiny part of creating a nurturing life for me.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara



Tuesday, March 3, 2009

THE QUEEN'S POT

Do you think this is an empty pot? At Glamis Castle, Scotland I wandered away from the group in the garden. A meadow & copse beckoned. Honestly, I thought it was off limits. Raising the siren call.
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Of course I went. Stopping first and investigating an area labeled, DO NOT ENTER. More about that happy adventure another day. On to the copse.
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In the frisson of meadow & copse, a pot. Tall, on a plinth. Big, you could bathe in it. Old, mortals could never afford it. Royalty? Obviously. And, GLORIOUSLY EMPTY.
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The pot was permission, YES, COME INTO MY LOVELY WOOD. I discovered an arboretum with every tree labeled and mature. I was walking in the pages of a picture book.
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No one from my group ventured into the copse. Those elegant trees were mine alone. One of the happiest moments of my life. This is when/where I invented, THE QUEEN'S POT.
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Tara's landscape design rule: your pots must be so incredible they can remain empty.
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Yesterday's snow & my Queen's Pot out the bay window.
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You can't bathe in her but she's bruised some men !
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Monday, March 2, 2009

THE WELL-PLACED CHAIR IN SNOW

In the walled garden at Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott's home, sat a well-placed chair. Its mission, aesthetic.
Place a chair in your landscape for aesthetics. Yes, a Tara landscape design rule.
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You'll find yourself there on a Saturday morning eating breakfast.
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When the 1st warm afternoon arrives you'll sit & have lunch.
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From a window you'll see a cardinal land on the arm and know, you're living a beautiful life.
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Imagine the picture,above, without the chair. A mush of snowy branches.

Yesterday, what it took to shoot a Southern Snow Storm.
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Garden & Be Well, XO T

Sunday, March 1, 2009

ARE SHADOWS DESIGNED INTO YOUR LANDSCAPE?

BETTER THAN WALLPAPER. Like my shadows? Of course you do. I designed them.
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The epiphany of designing shadows was instant wicked potent delight.
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PLAYING WITH SUNBEAMS.
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Shadows to fall, fold, envelope, embrace & caress a landscape and you.
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Sensuous shadows alighting on interior walls of your home. Pitching art where there was none before.
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Hmm. I've never seen a landscape design lecture about creating shadows. Perhaps I should include it in my list of titles?
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Chair is in my summerhouse.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara