Engine of Providence

Low Tara Turf, below.  From 1st meeting adored its charm, character, function.  Here, perfectly balanced with formal pruning, canopy, open, woodland beyond.
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Did you immediately understand all these things too?


Pic, above, here.
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Oddly, decades after falling deeply for Tara Turf, an epiphany.
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More than 'aesthetics', pure function.  Engine of Providence.
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Tara Turf next to canopy/understory are maximum pollinator habitat.
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My adoration/desire no different than the attraction a bee has for flowers.  None.
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Life at its most basic.
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Tara Turf, indeed.  Drama. Bees have known, since bees have been.
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Maximum pollinator habitat can increase crop yields by 80%, do the math.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO T
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TARA TURF

TARA TURF IS UNIQUE TO EACH REGION. 
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TARA TURF, in GA, is a mix of grass-moss-clover-mondo-ajuga-dandelion--mazus-and what the wind blows in. Add crocus, dwarf daffodil, thyme if desired.
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TARA TURF is mowed at 1-2-3 heights, below. Beneficial to wildlife, organic, sustainable, fragrant, low maintenance, eco and only uses rainwater.

                           Pic, above, I shot at Sissinghurst.

TARA TURF, mixed heights, above, in England.
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Studying landscapes in Europe I noticed, NO LAWNS. TARA TURF is used commercially and residentially.
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New neighborhoods lack smell and mixed insects. Did you know there are more good bugs than bad bugs?
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Old neighborhoods smell like my childhood. Clover, grass, bugs, dirt, all the good things.
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Most new neighborhoods have deed restrictions outlawing TARA TURF.
TARA TURF, I shot, in England, above.
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The outlaw label, against TARA TURF, should be amusing but the stakes are too high.
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The cost of mow-blow-go is too high. Lawn mowers are not regulated. One hour of lawn mowing is equal to 11 hours of driving a car.
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Fertilizer, insecticide & fungicide kill machorizal fungi, and are toxic to groundwater.
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 TARA TURF, I shot, in Italy, above.
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And drain into groundwater. Atrazine in our drinking water was on the front page of NY Times 8-23-09. TARA TURF uses no chemicals.
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Yes, I design lawns. Preferring TARA TURF but using what deed restrictions require. 

Edward Slingerland: Wu-Wei in the Garden

Most requested by clients/students?  "I don't want to spend a lot of money, it must have little maintenance."  This is what I know for sure.  Replying in detailed response to that pair of demands, via Gardenese language, no one accepts, no one.  From those who have asked, of course.
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"Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons."  Alan Watts, The Way of Zen.
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"Things become complicated only when we think about them."  Alan Watts.



Pic, above, here.
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"Trying to force a lock bends the key.  For which reason a truly intelligent man never forces an issue."  Alan Watts.  (I must try harder to prevent bent-key-thinking.  Better, when bent-key-thinking intrudes into my life, from another, "I'm not listening to your bent-key-thinking.")
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"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.  When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.  Instead you relax and float."  Alan Watts.
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Wielding this style Garden Design, above, rich, humorous, humbling.  Further along the Garden Design archetype than whence begun.  Few immune to the Garden Design archetypes path.  Nothing new, existed well before cuneiform records.
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Humorous?  Simplicity, above, gives you, you.  Richest construct in your life, you.
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"We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives.  As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves.  The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot "  Alan Watts.
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Funny?  In my garden, there is no 'me'.  In my garden, my body hears what my brain cannot.  In my garden, I am gone, with the body remaining present.  Follow your bliss, find where you experience eternity here, Joseph Campbell truths.  In my garden there is no me, no time, no hunger, no tiredness, no awareness of bruising/bleeding, no sense of want, no fear, expansive joy.  Deeper, at the conclusion of being in my garden, answers arrived to questions known, and unknown, ahead of being in my garden.  Epiphanies from spirit, without fear.
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Seek presence over productivity.  Gaining maximum productivity, though not sought.  .
"All to easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is."  Alan Watts. 
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Before I had a language describing being in my garden I labeled it, "The best selfishness ever."  After a few years realized it is grace.  How could it not be grace?  Epiphanies too many, too potent, life changing.  Bounty of resources, from garden epiphanies, beyond measure.  Into the realm of E.M.Forster describing a multi-millionaire woman, one of his characters, as having no 'resources'.  Interesting.  Letting go, giving up control, is a resource. 
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"The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces."  Alan Watts. 
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There are places to "Transcend our futile strategies for controlling life and surrender to its living essence."  In the garden, merely one. 
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"We have been taught to believe that the best way to achieve our goals is to reason about them carefully and strive consciously to reach them. Unfortunately, in many areas of life this is terrible advice. Many desirable states — happiness, attractiveness, spontaneity — are best pursued indirectly, and conscious thought and effortful striving can actually interfere with their attainment."  Edward Slingerland
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Your act of choice, is my Garden Design writing.  Write an article about how to dig a hole?  No longer do I confuse the map for the territory, noise for signal.  Though I'm wicked good about digging a hole with a shovel or auger attached to a Caterpillar.  Pure noise, how to dig a hole if you're wanting a good garden, you in your Garden is signal territory.
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" For the early Chinese thinkers … the culmination of knowledge is understood, not in terms of grasping a set of abstract principles, but rather as entering a state of wu-wei. The goal is to acquire the ability to move through the physical and social world in a manner that is completely spontaneous and yet fully in harmony with the proper order of the natural and human worlds (the Dao or “Way”). Because of this focus on knowing how rather than knowing this or that, the Chinese tradition has spent a great deal of energy over the past two thousand years exploring the interior, psychological feel of wu-wei, worrying about the paradox at the heart of it, and developing a variety of behavioral techniques to get around it. The ideal person in early China is more like a well-trained athlete or cultivated artist than a dispassionate cost-benefit analyzer."  Edward Slinglerland     
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"Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive."  Edward Slingerland. 
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Clients with gardens getting-there the fastest?  All women, ages 40+, and a gay couple who travel the globe for their work, and are 30+/50+. 
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"Some of the most elusive objects of our incessant pursuits are happiness and spontaneity, both of which are strikingly resistant to conscious pursuit."  Maria Popova
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" Wu-wei literally translates as “no trying” or “no doing,” but it’s not at all about dull inaction. In fact, it refers to the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bringing the entire world into harmonious order. For a person in wu-wei, proper and effective conduct follows as automatically as the body gives in to the seductive rhythm of a song. This state of harmony is both complex and holistic, involving as it does the integration of the body, the emotions, and the mind. If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like “effortless action” or “spontaneous action.” Being in wu-wei is relaxing and enjoyable, but in a deeply rewarding way that distinguishes it from cruder or more mundane pleasures."  Edward Slingerland.
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"We’re drawn to people with wu-wei, Slingerland argues, because we inherently trust the automatic, unconscious mind due to a simple fact from the psychology of trust — because spontaneity is hard to fake, we intuit that spontaneous people are authentic and thus trustworthy. But Western thought has suffered from centuries of oppressive dualism, treating intuition and the intellect as separate and often conflicting faculties — a toxic myth that limits us as a culture and as individuals. Fortunately, Slingerland points out, recent decades have brought a more embodied view of cognition acknowledging the inextricable link between thought and feeling and debunking, as Ray Bradbury so eloquently did, the false divide between emotion and rationality. (We’ve seen, too, that metaphorical thinking is central to our cognitive development, and metaphor is itself rooted in emotion.) The Chinese tradition, on the other hand, has a millennia-long history of cultivating a more integrated model of the human experience..."  Maria Popova .
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If you haven't discovered Maria Popova yet, you're going to be glad you have now.
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Letting go, and finding eternity, in the garden, has made my life.  Those in my tribe, share this joy.  This is your garden.  Not me writing about when to deadhead your peonies. 
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Within each Garden Design, from a historic template, wu-wei/grace/abiding, is the bonus.  Guaranteed. 
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Bunny Mellon: The Weeded Stone Terrace

Do you know, below, what you're looking at?
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Seeing stone terraces with 'weeds' in the cracks, was a moth-to-a-flame epiphany.  "Got it", immediately.  Never saw a stone terrace with 'weeds', by choice, in USA, discovered them studying historic gardens across Europe. 
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Soon after discovery, learned 'why' they originated.  WWI took most of the labor force for home/farm.  Stone terraces had been pristine, maintained yearly, with repointing between the stones.  No labor, no repointing, 'weeds'.  Of course decades had passed before my epiphany and those 'weeds' in stone terraces across Europe were mostly Lady's Mantle.  WWI created a new Garden Design conceit. 
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A few years had to pass for my stone terrace budget to align with wanting a stone terrace.  Once the stone terrace was installed, another 3-4 years passed getting the variety of  'weeds' perfected. 
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That stone terrace was hedged with Tea Olives, the Tea Olive Terrace.  Gave me years of joy, now, moved into a ca. 1900 home for 2 years, I miss my Tea Olive Terrace as I would a dear friend.     


Pic, above, Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
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Before I moved, Vanity Fair had a garden article with a stone terrace filled with weeds.  Almost an exact replica of my Tea Olive Terrace.  Who is this person?  Had to know.  This was my introduction to Bunny Mellon.
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Bunny is the only gardener in America I know of to purposefully design/install a stone terrace with 'weeds' too.
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The weeded terrace.  Takes 'weeded' to a new level. 
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Later, another epiphany arrived. Unbeknownst to me, adding 'weeds' to a stone terrace increases pollinator habitat, in a zone already rife for pollinators, high density with low density. 
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Garden & Be Well,    XOT
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No worries, well aware a weeded terrace is a love it or must get rid of the weeds venue.  Heart on my sleeve for weeds in stone.  Even if Bunny wasn't good company for loving a weeded terrace, the beauty and pollinators are more than enough joy.

Landscape Choices

Choices from the heart, below.  Why so rare?


Pic, above, here.
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"Honesty has a power that very few people can handle."  Anon.
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Make the choices for the garden in your heart.  Manifest.  Live.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T

Color: Counterintuitive Paint Trim

Happy charmer, below.  Makes me want to go inside. 
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See a change, an easy change too, making the roof higher and house taller?
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Once I tell you the change, you won't believe me.
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But, true nonetheless.
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Know?


Pic, above, here.
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Paint the trim at roof line, a tone darker than the siding or a darker tone from the roofing material.  Seems counterintuitive.
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White jumps forward, and pulls down, at roof line.  Darker tones heighten a home by a 1', or more.  Promise.
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Can't finish without mentioning the 'Welcome' sign.  Banal.  Dinky is Stinky.
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Especially here.  The front door is screaming 'Welcome !' with incredible class & elegance.  Why diminish that impact?
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Be wary putting words into your garden.  Can be done well, but with care.
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Favorite sign in a garden?  Tea Room & Toilets .
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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More rabbit holes in this photo.  Those delicious lights, too perfect.  But, that is gardening.  Layers of delight here.

Mastering the Art of Garden Design: Not What You Think

At the front end of planning your garden, from personal experience, if there is a problem with the outcome, those problems reside in you, not the garden.
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Assumptions about where to begin, "What plants will I have?", wildly, achingly, charmingly, sweetly, misplaced.  Going a step further, I did, decades ago, realized my initial assumptions beyond arrogant.  Worse, arrogance aimed at Nature.  There for me to wield.  Ha.
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Before we have language, we see Nature.  For most that unspoken language, remains throughout life.  Seeing through a glass darkly, thinking as a child type of stuff.
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Getting the horticulture degree, still, did not unlock the door to creating a beautiful garden, understanding Nature's language.  Off to Europe for decades studying historic gardens.  Designing/installing gardens all the while as vocation.  Dots on the Garden Design map emerged, some connected.  Map is not territory. 
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Having lunch at a client's farm, decades from my starting dot, standing inside her kitchen, looking through to the potager, a dot, outside the realm of Garden Design, appeared, and connected all the  dots.  The master dot.  Epiphanies are a drug of choice.  This one simple, seen since birth, yet zero comprehension for decades. 
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Providence never separated ornamental horticulture from agriculture.  Man's folly, made the separation.  Separation dot date?  Onset of the Industrial Revolution, late 19th century.  Until then we  lived with Nature.  The dot was clear.  Without it, death.
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"The eighteenth century was the culmination of thousands of years of agrarian society.  The nineteenth century would bring in the Industrial Revolution to America.  Until then, most societies based their economies on the raising and trading of crops, so nature was always in control.  People measured the work day by the rising and setting of the sun, and one hailstorm or flood could ruin a year's work.  Everyday life was an ongoing struggle against nature.
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Historically when people have been able to raise enough crops and food to sustain a comfortable life, they have challenged nature even further by turning their outdoor environment into a living art form, a pleasure garden.  Most societies have even given the garden religious significance.
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A garden is a balance between measured, human control on one hand and wild, mystical nature on the other.  It is the place where humans attempt to create their particular vision of an idealized order of nature and culture.  A garden is not just the opposition of unpredictable nature and organized society; it is the mediating space between them.  Human intellect, intuition, nurture, and spirit meld together in a garden.  Since culture shapes both the form and meaning of a garden at a particular place and time....."  Barbara Sarudy, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700-1805.     


Pic, above, here.

How little can you have in your Garden Design?  When I design a garden, the last question I ask myself, "What can I take away, and it holds together?"
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Inside a garden, above.  Outside a garden, below.
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Ironically, at every price point client, I'm told, "I don't want to spend a lot of money.  It must be easy to take care of."  These gardens, above/below.  Get it right.  Macro and micro.  Master dot.  Maximum pollinator habitat exists where hi density meets low density.  No, this garden isn't agriculture for man, it is agriculture for Nature.  Hence, us.
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Feed the bees. Without them we perish.  Basic.  Simple.  Nature knows, we forgot.  More to this Nature 'stuff', Barbara Saludy alluded to it richly, above.  Cadence.  Will get to that another day. 

 
Pic, above, here.
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One of the most potent Garden Designs you'll see, above.  Tara Turf, meadow mowed at differing heights, with a mix of plantings suitable to the zone, attracting myriad insects, attracting myriad mammals, (reptiles too, love my lizards), in turn attracting different genres of insects, mammals to the hedging and wild wood beyond.  Nature in full cycle, master dot included, high density mixed with low density.  While providing for property value increases, HVAC expense decreases, less maintenance, no chemicals, no irrigation.  Easily maintained with unskilled labor.  Of course the goal is to maintain as much as you can yourself, placing mind/body/soul into Nature's realm, Nature's cadence.  As long as you can.   
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Designing gardens, I design simple.  As requested.  After the concept plan, it's normal to receive requests for more 'stuff'.  Here's the negotiation.  Put this plan in first, if you want more later, easy.  Of course the final plan always includes a few of those extras.  If I don't put them in, the client will liberally dose the garden themselves.  Better to be like Barney Fife, Nip It.
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With a proper garden design, epiphanies daily.  Epiphanies that will change your life.  How could Nature not do that for you?  Example?  It's almost fall, when the trees drop their leaves, baring themselves naked ahead of winter, they are being fed by what they let go of.
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Meditate on that.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Front Door

Arriving to the open front door, below, I knew we had chosen well.  The screen door view, marvelous.   



With the screen door open, below. 



Ca. 1880 home on the shore of Bar Harbor, Maine. 
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With good weather the front door and French doors were left open all day.  Bedroom windows were open too, upstairs/downstairs.  Air off the Atlantic ocean a few yards away, a drug swirling throughout the house.
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This space, at your front door, a work horse.  Thru the years I've had a few clients with the perfect foyer, excepting natural light.  Into my Garden Design goes their glass door, matching the existing front door, with glass panels, below.  We source the door, and our carpenter puts in the glass.
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Pic, above, here.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Staying at Shore Path Cottage, top pics, discovered, leaving, it is next door to the home Beatrix Farrand lived in.

Garden Narrative: 20's vs 50's

Layers of narrative, below.  At the front end of learning Garden Design professionally, mid-20's,  this type of garden, below, equaled the type of home it fronted.    At that front end, this garden was also too simple, too rigid, too formal, too boring, too lacking.  Oh my what 3 decades have wrought.


Pic, above, here.
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Now I see the narrative of this garden as pure joy, wisdom and a proscenium for your life.  Infinite scope for the imagination.  Importantly, easy to maintain.  No drama, your life, fully, enough. 
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More, a Garden Design for any era, any architecture.   
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"The best of life is life lived quietly where nothing happens but our calm journey thru' the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.
-John McGahern".
Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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We are back from 10 days in Maine with a bit of Boston.  Portland, Freeport, Kennebunkport, Bar Harbor and more.
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One particular morning, staying at a B&B, still a private home built ca. 1880, on the shore in Bar Harbor, I arose early in excitement, knowing the coffee was awaiting, and exactly where I was going to sit and fully live.  The owner was awake and about, and as I carried my coffee to the porch, an older gentleman, already sitting and fully living, with a great deep voice said, "Good morning."  I replied in kind.  We two continued our full living in the greatest of silence, that symphony of Nature and ocean.
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An hour passed, the owner came outside to ask if we were ok.  The gentleman replied, "We are sharing a deep companionable silence."  She left.  We continued that deep companionable silence.  A few minutes later Beloved arrived, soon breakfast would be served and the day had begun its new threads.  "Take joy", Tasha Tudor signed off with.  Yes, indeed.
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Early morning view, Bar Harbor, Shore Path Cottage.

Pumpkin Pastiche

Not-one-bit-extra is an apt motto for my mom.  Poor dear was born into wrong era.  Her brain power seriously under utilized.  Married in the 1950's she had 2 kids and was a housewife and major volunteer.  Judge Judy never fails to amuse.  Especially her continuing success and earnings.  Why?  Mom could be Judge Judy, except bigger.  Mom could judge all the galaxies.  More, mom would pass judgment with the merest movement of her arched right eyebrow.  Clearly letting you know being stupid is the grander mistake than whatever brought you before that eyebrow.
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No surprise I grew up liking a little bit extra.  Not much.  Just a tad, or less.
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During the 1980's I worked at a garden center with many locations.  Christmas was a huge money maker for them, I still miss working there during Christmas.  Easter, Valentines and the other holidays were decorated too, lots of extra trinkets for sale.  I still use those holiday purchases.



One Halloween/Thanksgiving I performed in a play during 3rd grade.  Evening performance, all the parents/siblings in attendance.  How was I to know?  Read the paper teacher had us take home?  My parents would really go?  I didn't want to go.  Quite elaborate, the play a celebration of Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims.  Speaking parts, singing parts, dancing parts.  About 6-7 kids chosen to line the front of the stage at floor level, no singing, dancing, speaking for them.  Each child with a large cardboard cut out tied around their waist.  I was one of those few kids chosen to be in front.  Each of us, a sheaf of wheat.
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My dad, the NASA engineer, keep in mind this was the mid 60's, and I was a sheaf of wheat, when astronauts were dying, yet Kennedy and USA needed man-on-the-moon.  Standing thru the entire play, a sheaf of wheat, watching my dad get angrier, angrier.  I knew.  Not a star of the play, or even a speaking role, a sheaf of wheat.  It got quite ugly during the car ride home.  Best result?  Dad never came to a school event again.
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Age 8, I didn't know it took a strategy to be a sheaf of wheat.  All of us wheat sheaves, should have staged a pop-up Wind Storm, singing a ridiculous song we made up, finally collapsing into a pile.  If dad was going to be angry, I should have, at a minimum, made it worth my while.    



Pumpkins on our front porch, above, win zero awards for skill/talent, yet they pass my simple test question.  Does it make you smile?    
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Seriously, it's one of my Garden Design questions.  Does it make you smile?
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Cute Kills is a Garden Design rule.  Hmm.  Every rule meant to be broken.  Another Garden Design rule followed, Overdose on a Theme.  And, a favorite Garden Design rule followed, Dinky is Stinky.  You over it with my Garden Design rules?  I was too, at the front end of learning Garden Design.  Now, I understand Garden Design rules for what they truly are, PERMISSION.  Limitations?  Hardly.

Garden Design: A Color Rule

Crisp & tidy, below.
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Whimsical.
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Copying a seemingly staid Garden Design Rule.
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What rule is that?
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Pic, above, here.
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Paint your garden furniture & accessories same color as your house trim/shutters.  Have loved this 'rule' for decades.
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Here, they've done more than classically phone-it-in-garden-design.
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They've let the color carry the weight of architecture.
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Does your garden tell me who you are at the curb?  Check.
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Is your garden so incredible I must go inside and see your home?  Check.
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It's one thing to deeply, truly, adore a color.  Another, entirely, to wield that color across your realm.  No fear.  Life is short, wield your color.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Irma residue is almost put away on our property.  Living in our ca. 1900 home for 2 years, we've done little Garden Design, it's mostly roads/drainage/shed renovations/drilling a well/pond updating/clearing invasives etc.  My personal gardening consists of a pair of aloe plants in terra cotta, and an echeveria a friend gave me, repotted into terra cotta.  Three little souls in terra cotta.  Last weekend, watering my trio on the back deck, they did spend Irma inside the house, I noticed one of the aloe did not fit in its pot, it was dwarfed by its pot by .5" diameter.  Hmm.
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Yard a debris field with fallen limbs, a new roof at the back of the house, lots of men covering ground here.  Hmm.  They are our men, all on our team.  Several employed by Beloved loooong time.  Hmm.  Thinking this one thru, my little aloe in its new pot.  If any of the men had broken the pot, I would have been told, "Miss Tara........"  Days pass.  Approached Beloved, on the deck, we were grilling dinner, "My aloe vera is in a new pot, and I know who did it."  He's looking at me all stoic, his Mona Lisa smile something his mom would recognize about age 6.  "You did it."  A day prior, I repotted that aloe vera into another terra cotta pot, an exact fit.  He looks at the pot, "If I had found a pot to fit, would you have known?",  "No.", "How did you know it was me?", "The men always tell me when something happens.",  "Hit it when I was blowing the deck.", "5 acres, loads of men, new roof, tree limbs, I'm a Garden Designer with 3 tiny potted plants to her name, you thought I might not notice?"
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Why are these type of stories so deeply amusing?  He almost got away with it.  Would have been fine if he had....

Playgrounds & Microbiomes

Too many times I'm told, "We must have a lawn for the children."
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'Poppycock' my grandfather would say.
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Chose his word in mission to the front porch/yard, below.
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He was a doctor, he served in WWII.  Member of the greatest generation.
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How many of the greatest generation had the ubiquitous lawn-to-play-on ?  Few.  Instead, it was their generation bringing that lawn into ubiquity once they returned from war.
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Fun, below.  Makes me want to play seesaw too, a doll, and a dog in a wheelbarrow, plenty of running around space.  Scope for the imagination as Anne of Green Gables said in earnest.
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Today, will site my oldest wheelbarrow near the fig & meadow.  Laskett always follows me to the fig bush.  Up he goes, into the wheelbarrow, camera click.
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Better, I'll put a vintage Christening gown on him, to wear in that wheelbarrow.
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Play.  It's contagious.
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Remember well, playing quite hard growing up.  Designing gardens with children, I know to give them 'flow' around entire house.  Solid fence at a side of the house?  Up and over they go.  I did.  No professor in college for horticulture mentioned 'flow' for children in Garden Design.  It is intuitive.
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Twenty years in to my Garden Design career I went to a Feng Shui lecture.  She, the expert, can't remember her name, certainly put 'flow' around a home into her lecture.  With slides to back it up.  Sweet.
 

Pic, above, here.
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Now, this photo reads as a scene from a movie.  We traded for foundation plantings, monoculture tidy lawn, homeowner association rules, deed restrictions, and out the window went this scene, above.
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Complaints about lack of outdoor childhood play have been written about for decades now.  More, scientific studies are arriving showing our bodies need many layers of microbiomes found, yes, outside.  When will the study arrive proving the 'play' construct of childhood is Nature's way of getting us those Microbiomes.
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Swath of lands my childhood play included ranged from our yard, friend's yards, empty lots, the saltwater lake, a street over, behind our house, and a peninsula of land in Galveston Bay 2 blocks away.  Bless that era.  The peninsula, which I considered mine, is now fenced & gated, a sign-in sheet for entry, which the police check, and warnings of all types.  Warnings.  Seriously?  It was my playground, no fear, pure fun.  Different world now.  More important than ever to include play spaces.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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More than making sure children have play spaces, make sure you have play spaces.  A conservatory with vintage furnishings, invite girlfriends for lunch or in the evening for wine/canapes, best 'tea party' ever.

Relandscape vs. Delandscape

Ok, I get the house statement, below.  Well done.
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Landscape?  As my dear friend Susanne Hudson will say, dinky-is-stinky.
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Two approaches, below.  First approach, quite common, decades of experience with this 'issue'.  Build a fine home, there goes the landscape budget.  This home, below, can handle a lower landscape budget.  I would go much lower with this landscape budget.
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How?


Pic, above, here.
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Remove every foundation shrub, above, tuck lawn all-the-way to the house.  Done.
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If I had the chance to live in this home, very nice, lawn to the house, and a dense evergreen hedge at the curb.  More, slant the hedge higher at the right to lower at the left, copying the roof pitch in reverse.
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At present I 'see', "No budget for landscape."
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Merely removing the foundation plantings says, "Architectural choice, bold.  Nothing dinky-is-stinky here."
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This home a good example, removing-ugly frees the house to breath and show its beauty.  TV garden shows are always about adding landscape to make the house better.  It's not uncommon, with older homes especially, removing landscape makes the house better.  Perhaps this should be a named genre, Delandscaping.
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Take it away.
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Hope Delandscaping is a new arrow for your quiver.  Another way to 'see' landscape.
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Garden & Be Well,    XOT
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Lovely tree pruning, above.  
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It's not often I take out an entire foundation planting, perhaps 5-6 times in 3 decades.  Yet, 100% of those 'husbands' said, "I would have ripped it out first day we moved in if I knew my house looked this good."  And they all had waited years.