There is so little here, below, yet it is a full narrative. Better, it's a classic foyer and front door. The stone table is full on serious, or whimsy.
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Not your style? Not your budget? Evergreen hedge instead of adobe, gravel instead of stone, rescued 'something' for 'door'.
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Ironically, this zone, below, is mostly missing-in-action, in the majority of landscapes. It's not rare for me to work a jobsite with an existing garden, all I have to do is connect the existing dots. How? Design foyers, doorways and halls connecting existing garden rooms. Choose a color trinity, a style 'theme' already indicated by the house/interior, and, what had been hodge-podge-lodge becomes a classic template having survived centuries. This isn't rocket science.
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Odd, this superpower, seeing garden rooms since earliest childhood.
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Quite fun, for me, to be in a garden, with its owner, and exactly point out where the foyers, entryways, and hallways are. Haven't lost anyone yet. That moment when they 'see'. Love those ineffable moments.
Pic, above, here.
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Do you see your foyers, living rooms, hallways, entryways, in the garden?
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Best way to describe the ineffable, below.
Pic, above, here.
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Many things are outgrown, somehow, from childhood I kept this, above, the little girl at right. She's totally absorbed, she's in the garden realm of eternity, no longer tied to Earth. Not bound by time, hunger, getting bloodied/bruised are of no account, only being in that realm, real. A stewardship with Nature, washing the servants feet, in gratitude. A place to harvest grace, no matter the swirl in a life.
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Man separated, quite recently, merely post WWII for USA, agriculture & horticulture. Buzz words with new meanings have to be invented to maintain the bifurcation. Eco, sustainable, regenerative, organic. Industrial agriculture, and landscaping with a mow-blow-go contract. Whew.
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The role of animals/insects/fungi in Nature is fraught in man's stewardship. I've been looking for something to add, to the prayer ahead of meals, about our stewardship, or at minimum, an awareness.
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Found it, in the macro,
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. for the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. they are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." Henry Beston, 1888-1968, "The Outermost House".
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And another Beston, below,
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"When the Pleiadese and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity."
12 comments
Robin saysOctober 25, 2014
Thanks this was very helpful. I would like to see more very practical well laid out guild ideas like this!
Red Brady saysNovember 3, 2014
We’ve just planted the first two native apple trees in what will, we hope, be our forest garden (currently a large grassed paddock). Working out the rest of it is proving to be fun!
dhalsey saysDecember 8, 2014
Here is a polyculture page at the Natural Capital Plant Database:
http://permacultureplantdata.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=488&Itemid=237
http://permacultureplantdata.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=488&Itemid=237
Another implementation of a polyculture guild.
http://southwoodsforestgardens.blogspot.com/2013/07/patio-polyculture-orchard-design.html
http://southwoodsforestgardens.blogspot.com/2013/07/patio-polyculture-orchard-design.html
Ground cover whatever the plant is important in all these guilds. Occupy the soil space and absorb the sun into organic matter. Dan
Keshet Miller saysDecember 8, 2014
Mmm some very useful knowledge here…. they didnt mention the importance of a gazebo though! Heheh 🙂
Jock McClure saysJanuary 17, 2015
My tree might certainly benefit from this info! I owe it some consideration.
Betsy Beard saysJanuary 17, 2015
What kind of guilds are they talking about here? Do they mean to say ‘guides?’
Bernice saysJanuary 17, 2015
Would like a natural way to spray or keep worms from cherrys and to keep robins out of my cherrytrees
haecklers saysApril 11, 2015
How do you prevent insect pests by picking up dropped fruit to break the lifecycle with all those plants under the trees? How to you get to the fruit to harvest it? Those two are what’s been keeping me from planting guilds under my trees!
Anonymous saysSeptember 20, 2015
Very helpful.I have learned much
Thankyou
Thankyou