New York Times: A.O. Scott On Landscape

"Idiosyncratic...........sneaky.......overt....cosmic.

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Mundane.......dispiriting.

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Calabria......earthly transit........material transmutation.......care......engrossed.....cinematic prose.......epic.

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Lyrical depth.......all of creation.

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Incursions of modernity are minimal..........ancient.
Freshness......sense of discovery......

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Totem.................tragic........plot......character.....performance.................peasant customs.

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Clarity................

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Wit of a silent-film maestro.............................sustained..........Elegantly staged accident.

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Absurd.

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Rigged..............deftly.............most Newtonian of his farces..........

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Intrinsic preposterousness...

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Philosophical stratagem.

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Accessible and endlessly mysterious........

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If you pay attention....

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Grasp the connections..............................startling.........shocking..............angle of vision.......

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Disparate..........lingering.............

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You have never seen anything like this movie, even though what it shows you has been there all along."

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'You have never seen anything like this GARDEN, even though what it shows you has been there all along.' (My version of A.O. Scott's sentence.)

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How to describe what you've just read? Inspiration via words.

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A.O. Scott is a film reviewer for the New York Times. I read his articles with a pen, circling & underlining phrases & words. Later, I put his words & phrases into my journal, written by hand. Seeing his words/phrases I see gardens. Stories of gardens.

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The best gardens contain all of A.O. Scott's words/phrases.

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Gardens are where all resides. Metaphors for living. A moat of grace.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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My paternal grandmother played the newspaper on the piano. Her brain translated words/letters into notes. I translate stories into gardens. Forms of synesthesia?

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I took the pic in France, a private garden.

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A.O. Scott words from his recent NYTimes article, Eternal Complexities Of the Very Simple Life.

How To Place Beautiful Things

My beautiful pot on plinth, below, placed on axis with the middle window pane of my bay window at the drawing room. Thus sited, it's part of my drawing room. Not separate.How to place, below, a beautiful summer house?
On axis with a main pair of windows from the home, of course !

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Oops. No pic of the view seen while in the summerhouse above. Ha, must get back to the Cotswolds for it.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Top pic in my sweet garden, in the Bay Terrace, aka front yard. I took the bottom pic in the Cotswolds at Sir Hardy Amies garden.

How To Choose Flooring

Landscape Design is a series of layers. After creating your ceilings & walls (previous 2 posts), create your Flooring. Shade, grass won't grow? Choose checkerboard, below, with shade loving groundcover.Forget STUPID lawn. Choose Tara Turf, below. A mix of what the wind blows in, the birds drop, clover, dwarf bulbs, herbs, spreading groundcovers & etc. Tara Turf is meadow made formal with mowing heights.
Want million dollar flooring for $20/ton? Choose gravel, below. Zero mowing, lovely crunch.

Choose flooring, below, to emphasize formal, informal. If this were a woodland design the flagstone would be removed & woodchips used. (1 of 3 gates, below, at the front of my garden.)
Mother Nature, below, laughed at my efforts, sprinkling a flagstone path with her petals.
River stones, glacial stones, laid in patterns for paths &
terraces. Rough laid stones, above, contrasting nicely with smooth stone folly & pair of obelisks.

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Wood floor inside with antique oriental rug? Same concept in the landscape, above:

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stone path=wood floor

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plants=antique oriental rug. (Adore using my engineering degree in this manner! You do realize you are entirely within my landscape design equation at the moment?)

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Design outside is the same as design inside.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Top pic I took in Susanne Hudson's garden, 2nd pic I took at Sissinghurst, 3rd pic I took in the Cotswolds, 4-5 pics in my sweet garden, 6th pic I took in Sir Hardy Amies garden not far from the 3rd pic. This is hilarious, I don't remember anything. These pics? Remember taking each of them.

The Walls Of Your Rooms

Landscapes ARE architecture. Begin creating architecture in the landscape with ceilings, yesterday's post, then walls. (My Tea Olive Terrace, below, along the side of my home.)Landscape walls can be the side of your home, above, or all plantings, below. (Wall, below, is mine & hides the neighborhood from my tender sensibilities. What me not living in the Cotswolds?)
Espaliered woody shrubs & vines dramatize the walls of a home, fence, dependency & etc., below. (My Bay Terrace, below.)
Using wit, below, Susanne Hudson swags a window. Pow, Shazam, baby.
With more wit, intellect, & drama she created a garden room, raised on a dais (aka deck, but dais is ever so much nicer, yes?),
with old church windows.
Landscape Design: create walls.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Slow down, peruse again, Landscape Design IS this easy. Look at the 2nd pic again. Notice how much sky I own because of my walls? You would CRINGE knowing how many houses along the ubiquitous subdivision cul-de-sac lane (aka street) my garden obliterates in that 2nd pic. Who knew? Gardens are offense & defense. A moat of grace around home & life.

Landscape Design Is Architecture: Ceilings

When I begin a Landscape Design I create ceilings: sky, trees, arbors. Within a landscape design a cone shaped plant should be in each garden room, drawing eyes to the sky. My tiny property lives as large as the meadow/pole barn, above, I own the sky, and use it, framed by trees, as ceilings to my garden rooms. Landscape design upon acreage is the same for a postage stamp.
Sir Hardy Amies, above, uses sky, canopy/understory trees, cone shaped summerhouse, and the wit of cone shaped obelisks with balled toppers.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Landscape Design Perfection: Sir Hardy Amies

I took this pic in the Cotswolds in Sir Hardy Amies garden.A complete landscape design course, in one picture.

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Looks easy, can you do it?

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Money is not a criteria. Rescued plants, rescued hardscape & etc..... Yes, you can do this.

The Hunting Lodge: John Fowler & Nicky Haslam

If men come to build sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater art, (you do realize this is Pope, ca. 17th century?) the Hunting Lodge, ca. 1730, below, proves a succession of exception. John Fowler & Nicky Haslam specifically.First time seeing the Hunting Lodge? Your lucky day.
Pigtown - Design, aka Meg Fairfax Fielding, discovered a recent Wallstreet Journal article about this Vanishing Threshold of delight.

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Do not miss this jewel of design. Many ideas to copy in your garden, & home.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics via Aesthetes Lament

Blooms, Wicker, Toile

Bringing home blooms this week, below, in the back of Tess.Blooms - Wicker - Toile !!

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Puppet Barbuda delights in trinities.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Tess is my little van. She has 6 doors & is tricked-out for ALL things garden designing, lecturing, touring, shopping. Tess brakes for Open Gardens with Tea & Scones.

2 Couches: Interiors & Exteriors

Saw this on Cote de Texas yesterday. Pic is from the April, 2011 Veranda magazine.
Cannot wait to do this exact design, OUTSIDE !

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Will the client who needs this contact me NOW ! (Reality? I'm calling some clients today, "look at my blog post, you NEED this on your terrace.)

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We can source most everything from the Gardens arena at AmericasMart in downtown Atlanta.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Of course we're going to copy correctly and do the coffee tables, chairs & etc. too.

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How often does a landscape magazine turn me on like this? Well, let's not go there.

How To Use An Ugly Lamp

In my Conservatory yesterday, during an open garden, a delightful woman said,
"That is the best use of an ugly lamp." We all looked at the direction of her gaze/comment.
After the laughter subsided we agreed, yes the peacock blue lamp with original shade is ugly. But it's perfect.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Cobalt blue, peacock blue, don't know what to call it but I LOVE this color. And that is EXACTLY why this ugly lamp is perfect; personal passion. The lamp shade is more horrendous than the lamp. It, too, 'works'. Naturally, it came from my favorite thrift store years ago.

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What's not to love about a woman who will say such things to someone she just met? Another facet I adore about gardeners; blunt talk.

Still Life: Is This You?

As she came in, below, she set her hat & pruners on the window sill.It's a peculiar fetish of mine.

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Life creating still life without effort. The detritus of your life telling a story, beautifully.

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She? I snapped the pic in Ireland. Yes, Helen Dillon.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

Vertical Gardening

Every garden must have at least 1 cone shaped evergreen. Draw eyes to the sky. More about this Italian garden, above, here.
Gertrude Jekyll, famous landscape designer, said, "The first thing I consider is what to put on the house." At zero point in college or symposia has anyone said this to me. Took this pic in France, a private garden. In addition to vines on a house, I like espaliered woody flowering shrubs, they need no trellis or wire.
Vertical gardening on a tiny subdivision lot, above, canopy & understory trees with climbing roses. If Monet could have a climbing rose thru his understory trees, so can I. That's my garden, above. The window? It's where I'm typing this post.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Quite selfish leading with the pic I took in Italy. A garden brimming with epiphanies. While I was in it and after.

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3 Vertical Gardening concepts, get started.

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Garden Designers Round Table: MORE Vertical Gardening Posts !!

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Garden Up! Vertical Gardening

March 22, 2011 by susan morrison

When you hear the phrase “vertical gardening,” what comes to mind? You might think about roses scrambling up a trellis, or an overhead arbor dripping with wisteria. Those with a contemporary aesthetic may envision a mosaic of succulents hung on an outdoor wall, while edible gardeners see a riotous mix of creative containers, with tomatoes and peas reaching for the sun.

Vertical gardening is all those things and more. To celebrate the publication of Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces by roundtable members Susan Morrison and Rebecca Sweet, this month our designers share their own unique perspectives on this exciting garden trend.

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK
Pam Penick : Digging : Austin, TX »
Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In the Garden : Los Altos, CA »
Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT »
Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA »
Tara Dillard : Vanishing Threshold : Atlanta, GA »