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
&
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.
Gertrude Jekyll's beloved home, Munstead Wood, above.
My rule for focal points, just-let-it-touch, above. 
Freshness......sense of discovery......
How to place, below, a beautiful summer house?
On axis with a main pair of windows from the home, of course !
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.
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.
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. 
A complete landscape design course, in one picture.
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.
Blooms - Wicker - Toile !!
Cannot wait to do this exact design, OUTSIDE !
"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. 
