How to Layer Your Garden, Save Money & Create Less Work

Espalier apples, below, layered with flowering plants increase yields to 80%.

 Flowering trees, bushes, ground covers, above/below.  Chosen for sequence of blooms, toughness against drought/disease/insects, position for layers, and, attractiveness to beneficial insects & song birds.

Once mature, garden layers eliminate need for mulch & fertilizers, less or no mowing, prevent weeds, and enrich soil.        

                                         What garden center wants you to have this type of garden?  They cannot sell you annuals, weed killers, fertilizers, mulch.  Yearly.  For decades.
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When is the last time Suze Orman saved homeowners this much money, and costly effort/time, while benefiting Earth?  And put healthy, tax free, inexpensive fruit/vegetables on the table, with garden layers increasing property value while reducing HVAC expenses.  Suze, who?  Go me.  And you.

Did you know nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizers kill soil mycorrhizal fungi & earthworms, & are toxic to the water supply?

Unexpected 'majesty', aka stateliness-dignity-beauty, in my little garden's layers, above.

Through the apple orchard, above, Laura. 

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pics taken yesterday at the Bay Terrace, aka front yard.  Today, working at the table Laura sitting on, above.  Stopped for apples last month at the grocery store.  Asked the clerk if she had the product correct, each apple was over a $1.  Hello fruit trees, and veggies in my garden !!

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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.

The Minimalist Guide to Building Your own Conservatory

Better Homes & Gardens magazine recently put a Conservatory I built with Susanne Hudson for the Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival in their magazine again.  Haven't read it yet but am curious.

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My garden is 8500sf total, including house.  This is for tiny gardens too.

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Conservatory in my garden, below,  best investment in 'me' ever.

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Salient facts: 12' x 18' is the minimum size, doors must be on 2 walls minimum, electrical outlets on every wall, chandelier, ceiling fans, wood stove.  Site parallel or perpendicular to your home.  

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 A 'moveable' structure meets most zoning laws allowing you to site properly.

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90% rescued materials, below.  Most, a century old.

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A decade of search/rescue + filling the piggy bank to pay for labor/materials/electrical.  Voila.

Choose a good carpenter, let their talent shine on your team.

Never tire of these French doors, they began life a century ago, 1 each side of a fireplace, in my grandmother's Federal style house.

Ground was not level.  Stone steps were rescued, and gravel chosen for the floor.  No worries getting finished interior grade level.

Conservatory, above, Susanne & I built, in the new BHG magazine.  Styling, above, is ours, the magazine has theirs.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Top 3 pics in my backyard.  Wanted a larger Conservatory but space did not allow.  Squeaked by with the minimum, 12' x 18'.  The day my Conservatory was completed and the men helped bring in all the antiques from the garage, then left, I sat in the finished Conservatory for the 1st time alone, IT BEGAN.  Life's tipping point.  Who knew?  Beware of getting what you ask for.  It WILL change your life.  What was seen thru a glass darkly will shine clear.  In that moment you will let go of every thing holding you back.  Fear that crippled will fall away as if you knew nothing of its existence.
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Lunch Ministry is often held in my Conservatory.  Amazing the amount of laughter, and tears, this blessed Conservatory has already harbored with friends.  Beloved, when he realizes I'm in the Conservatory, most often, will leave me alone until 'I' decide to come in.  Grace pulsating.
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Minimalist?  Mentored, as a little girl, by Miss Katherine Scott, "I can live without the necessities but must have the luxuries."  From age 7, wisdom understood.  An understanding never appreciated by my dad, a little more by Beloved.  Kindred spirits totally 'get it'.
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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.

                                                                                 .

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.

How to Fix the Porch to Patio Dead-End

Lovely porch & courtyard.

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Porch opens into house, not courtyard.

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Dead-end from courtyard to porch.

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Dead-end from porch to courtyard.

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Not in my realm.

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This will not be.

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Center section will soon be French folding screen doors with steps to the courtyard.

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Why 'folding' ?

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They entertain, French folding screen doors take less space.

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Have never seen or thought of French folding screen doors till this job.

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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara

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Pic on the job last week.  Yes I wanted to take precious home !!  He stayed faithfully by my side as I worked throughout his garden.

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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.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning

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

5 Ways to Get Subsidiary Focal Points Right

Not a focal point, below, but a grand subsidiary focal point.

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Garden Design Rule: One Focal Point per Area.

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Not my rule, but agreed to.

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What to do?  Invent another rule.

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Focal Points are allowed subsidiary focal points nearby if they recede, touch foliage, don't draw attention.   Can be numerous if properly chosen & sited.

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Focal Points & Subsidiary Focal Points must both be so wonderful they will be fought over at your estate sale.

Pots must be so wonderful they can remain empty.  This young man, above, has dead plantings and he's fabulous.
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More, he flows with the style of the home's interior.
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Dogs, 3 young children, parents each own a business, they have farm property nearby, and a lake house.
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Get the picture?  Zero time for the garden.

Designing for women 80+, taught me how to truly design with tough love.  A huge honor, and weight.  They demand beauty, must have unskilled labor to maintain & little of it, something coming into bloom every 2 weeks, focal points on axis from inside views into the garden.  Nothing can go wrong with the garden.  Nothing.  Health issues arise, the house needs a new roof, a toilet floods.  If the garden has issues, they may decide to move.  It is my goal, their garden gives strength & joy to carry on in their home.  
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pic this week in a client garden.
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 For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

.

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

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning

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

From Amusement to Stewardship

 This is what I sought, below.  Only recently, decades in, the mission is known to be mistaken.
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Garden Design, contrast round flowers with spikey flowers, big leaves with small leaves, dark green with silver, focal points on axis with the house, expose the sky - frame with canopy trees - dress the walls - cover the floors, a bit of woodland & meadow, something coming into bloom every 2 weeks all year.
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Go ahead, take the above facts and create your own beautiful garden.
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Sited properly HVAC costs lower & property values rise.
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Do the above & you've done a lot.

Done for myself, paid to do it for others.  Thought this was the mission.  Not a little wrong, wildly.

 With a knowing smile, I see others deeply into Garden Design, personally/professionally, aware that was me, in a past life.  Glad to leave it.

Garden Design is mere amusement.  Garden Design gives a reaction, there is much more to be had.
 

From amusement to stewardship, a relationship of atonement & abiding with Nature.

 Garden Design lesson above?  Copied from studying historic gardens across the globe for decades.  Never realizing it's maximum pollinator habitat & about survival.  Agriculture needed ornamental gardens.  What had been understood as pretty historic gardens & homes were machines for survival.
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What?  Combining agriculture with pretty flowers increases crop yield by 80%.

What I had sought as a beautiful historic Garden Design formula is instead the template of Providence.

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My garden, and Garden Designs have been organic & sustainable for decades.

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Organic & sustainable are not enough.  Stewardship is the key.

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Take the key, it's free & simple.

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Organic & sustainable, in the great USA manner, are something to sell.

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Stewardship is within you.

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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara

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Pics in my garden this spring.  Wish the chickens had been here my entire 3 decades.  Their poop goes into the garden daily.  Their eggs have become my 'Egg Ministry'.  And gave me Stewardship.  Understanding the relationship of Earth, livestock, plants, survival.

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

.

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

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning

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

Nurture Your Creativity

Ca. 1950 ranch.  Front yard, house on the golf course.

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Drawn on site.  Folding table/chair moved a dozen times.

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Don't mess with how I work.

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How the potter molds clay, similar to how I design.

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Feet in the garden, eyes/mind/Spirit/hand, in symphony.

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Performing.

More regions of the brain activated, than sitting in the office on a computer.

Designing on the computer would be like playing the violin by hooking it up to wires and tapping on the computer keyboard to get the sweetest sounds played.  Not !

Whence my creativity, I know.  And, nurture.

Within that zone of creativity, is, I imagine, what others gain from cocaine.  Don't know, never tried it.  Don't need to, got better.  

 "Some get a kick from cocaine**
I'm sure that if I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrific'ly too
Yet I get a kick out of you."   Cole Porter

Each time a plan completed the awe in time.  Felt like seconds, yet hours passed.  Little in life allows me to forget time, or hunger.
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" My general formula for my students is "Follow your bliss." Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it. 

Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth
pp. 120, 149 "
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Great fear, indeed.  Campbell should have added some in your life add to that fear, not trusting the path you've chosen.  
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My father was horrified at my career choice, and embarrassed.  And vocal.  My engineering degree unused, the horticulture degree supporting me.
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What I do for a living, and how I do it, are the best life choices, for me.  Bucking my dad literally made me ill at times.  
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Best choice I've ever made, and the hardest.
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Garden  & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics from jobsite this spring.
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

.

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

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning

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

Taking Commercial Ideas for Residential

 My team is putting in landscaping at a new commercial site.  Had time to peak at the interior decorator's work.  This is the welcome zone, next 4 pics.  More than colors, lighting, flooring, textures etc.  Their work has to 'sell' the project and project a realm of comfort, fun, value, and safety.  This is college student housing 'today'.

The owners of the site have millions invested, they are not making any mistakes with their interior design team, or the landscaping.

Tile 'wood', above, in the large foyer.  Some 'wood' tile is exterior proof, not all.

Exterior block fascia, above.  Good solution for many stucco or lapboard homes in the South, update the cinder block 'foundation'.

Amenities area, above, look closely at the tanning shelf in that pool.

 Alas, typical soil for planting, above.  Great for buildings, bad for plants.

 Grading, above.  Get it wrong and decades of trouble ahead.  Rare the project affording a fix later.

Trees, above, cannot be planted by hand only.  Machines to move/site/dig, men to finish.

At the end of the day.  Several weeks to complete the project, the team will eat out but mostly take turns cooking.  

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Every commercial job teaches me something new for residential.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics on the job.

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Watched a new team member digging with the guys, he was handling the shovel letting his back do most of the work.  Mentioned to him, up front, to watch the guys and copy.  Of course they were all pushing the metal shovel head with their heals.

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Intuitive to the guys.  I had always pushed in with the arch of my foot until reading Graham Stewart Thomas.

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Small fact, big difference.  

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No excuse for wearing flips on the job.  Except my job was merely taking a few pics.  Another excuse?  Do you understand how hot/humid the South is in summer?  Wellies, Birkies & Justin snake boots nearby in the van.  Last excuse, much too old not to wear what I want !

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

.

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

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning

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

Garden Design Rule for Eyesores & Terrible Garden Gifts

This client was not home at the start of my work.

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I lasted an hour before I HAD to Move-The-Duck.

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Wish they had hired me before the new concrete walkway, and electrical outlet.
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Not much to do, if the dressed duck must stay.  Did you know there is a Garden Design Rule for this situation?  If you have an eyesore, place a focal point nearby.
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Doubt my professor imagined this dressed duck as a focal point.
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However, when children, grandchildren, or the toughest, a bit too prickly daughter-in-law are involved, the fill-in-the-blank must be 'displayed'.

Now, the dressed duck is drawing the eye away from the electrical box and providing welcome at the steps.
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A mentor said, "It's what we do with what we have."
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This garden has a child.  The duck will happily stay as long as the dressed duck magic is needed for her.
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The prickly daughter-in-law?  Easy, use her gift prominently in the garden for a few months then it has an 'accident'.  Tree limb, wind, ice, when it is safely taken to the thrift store.  In one garden the offensive item, a resin dollar store birdbath, could not be easily 'lost', that daughter-in-law had prickles of toxic steel.  The birdbath was horrendous.  Epiphany !  I designed a creeping fig at the base to engulf the offensive birdbath turning it into something lovely.
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Knocking at a friend's door for a lunch date I locked eyes on her new wind chime, melted glass beer bottles hanging from fishing line on a bit of tree root, then her.  She merely said, "My step-daughter."  I replied, "It fell and broke into shards."  Now you know the story of that thrift store item.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics taken at a jobsite this spring.  In the South terrible garden gifts are received with a smiling exclamation, "You shouldn't have, bless your heart."

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

.

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

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning

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

Elements of Simplicity in Garden Design

Plain?  No, totally designed.

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 Embellishment?  Why?  What is that about?  Lack of confidence, knowledge of the wrong sort, arrogance against Providence?

 Tara Turf.  Gravel from the local river.

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Century old bricks made in Milledgeville, GA, an hour's drive.

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I designed the buttress copying an antebellum cotton warehouse seen near Atlanta.

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The walled garden was the client's idea.  

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It was my good fortune to design & site it.

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Oddly, with total confidence.

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Whence does that come?  Truly, a subdivision child ca. 1960, living in a subdivision still.

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Degreed in USA horticulture, not taught how to  design a good garden to save anyone's soul.  Much less my own.

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Off I went, $20 bills stuffed singly & slowly, somehow paying for 2+ decades of studying the best historic gardens across Europe.

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With this project, 300 acres, I learned what the real focus of those decades had been. 

Garden design working with land & home.

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More, mind/body/spirit.

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Land & home, team members with the garden design.  Literally, the best performers with the most talent.

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That college degree in horticulture?  Training to work against the land, ignore every gift of Providence.

Doubt any of my college professors could give a concise sentence about the style of Henry Repton.  In, "Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Repton wrote:

“The perfection of landscape gardening consists in the four following requisites. First, it must display the natural beauties and hide the defects of every situation. Secondly, it should give the appearance of extent and freedom by carefully disguising or hiding the boundary. Thirdly, it must studiously conceal every interference of art. However expensive by which the natural scenery is improved; making the whole appear the production of nature only; and fourthly, all objects of mere convenience or comfort, if incapable of being made ornamental, or of becoming proper parts of the general scenery, must be removed or concealed”.

The garden views, above/below, totally designed.  Providence reigns, human arrogance replaced with a pride in unveiling Nature's gifts.

Henry would know this garden.
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Beyond the Tara Turf, above, is my best design work.  Views across a Natural pasture into woodland.  .
Curiously, this type of gardening is perfect for the starter home on a postage stamp with little budget.  Instead, that type of home is built with an expensive landscape.  Lawn with mowing/chemicals/fertilizers, bushes needing regular pruning & mulching, nothing to shade the house reducing hvac, nor fruit trees to feed the household, certainly not any focal points on axis with the house to feed the spirit.
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Truth, with your full intellect, if you demand more from your landscape you will have it.
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By the time anyone hires me, that choice has been made.  Incredible to work for people who have engaged with their own lives.  Same, when I lecture.  Every chair filled with people who have engaged with their life.  They aren't there for me, nor am I, we are there for the same reason as Henry.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pics taken at a jobsite earlier this year.
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The capitalized words? Used in the vintage sense.  Underlined sentence at the top?  Describing myself on the front end.  This has not been a boring ride !
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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

.

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

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning

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