Agrarian vs. Industrialized vs. You

Gardens begin inside your home.  Looking out.
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Your home is the garden's backdrop.
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The Agrarian & Pastoral ideal.  Idyll.  For you.  Now.  No matter the global industrialized anthropocene stew driving markets, and life.
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Agrarian.  More than sustainable.  Regenerative.
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More than regenerative.  Transcendent.  "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."  Marcus Tullius Cicero, Jan. 3, 106 BC - Dec. 7, 43 BC.
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Why consider Agrarian?  Why choose Agrarian?  Why be Agrarian though industrialized?  Sacred vs. profane, reality vs. grace.  The shorthand of Agrarian is unspoken, mostly, but well spoken, from birth, within.  "...the division between practical reason and aesthetic understanding is in fact untenable, and that until the relation between the two is re-established they must both remain impoverished."  Sir Roger Scruton.
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His back isn't facing you, below, he's telling you there is a life of transcendence inside.  Join us, please come inside.   



Pic, above, here.
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"Aim for the chopping block.  If you aim for the wood you will have nothing.  Aim past the wood, aim thru the wood; aim for the chopping block."  Annie Dillard.

 
Pic, above, here.
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"Hone & spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff."  Annie Dillard

 
Pic, above, here.
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"You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment."  Annie Dillard
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"If you cultivate a healthy poverty & simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact 'planted' in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days."  Annie Dillard.
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Understand what the back of his robe is saying, top pic, this is Nature's gift, telling us the stories of life.  Nothing less than your life, in all its fullness.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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I take no credit for this deep need for Agrarian gardens, it came unbidden.  Since age 3, I knew.  Didn't know what I knew, no words, adults certainly weren't talking about the things 'I knew'.   More, I've always known I work for 'Tara', known I had a lane of my own.  Thought everyone had the same.   Amusing what we get right, what we get wrong, oblivious to both in error at times.

A Surprise Wedding

Beloved & I were married on a boat on the St. John's River in DeBary, FL, Valentines Day, 2019.  Last second, and perfect.
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Pic, above, here.
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Early 2010 I met Beloved at a jobsite, he was the contractor, I had drawn the landscape.  When my client set up the meeting, she said it was mainly for me to meet him, and make sure, "You keep him in his place."  She had worked with him at another property, liked his work, but knew my plan would be a bit different for him.  Agrarian, historic, regenerative, today's Modern.
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Our 'Chapel', above, here.
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We had a good year working together professionally at that site, and others.  My longtime contractor, David Stevens had died, good contractors in my industry are tough to find, for the types of gardens I create, the new modern agrarian.  Landscape contractors make more money with formulaic industrialized landscapes, and their maintenance contract.  My gardens are beyond sustainable, (why aim low?), my gardens are regenerative.
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After yet another working dinner, we were pouring a driveway early next morning for a client, Beloved threw a Hail Mary.  He kissed me.  More, during the kiss he asked me to marry him.  Until that moment, he had been the perfect gentleman.  Me, shocked much?
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A small town boy, I had experienced Beloved's manner with his employees, clients, vendors, and subcontractors for almost a year, with respect.  Always appreciating his professionalism towards me.
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Remember, Love American Style?
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Pic, above, here.
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It was my turn to move fast.  Told him, immediately after that nice Hail Mary kiss, my life was beyond full, and there would be no 'fireworks' until that fullness deflated.  He could walk-on-by, or wait.
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Almost a full decade has passed since Beloved's 1st kiss.  There is something I will miss from those years, his proposals.  We had a consultation job in Silicone Valley, on acreage, he proposed during a lunch at Fisherman's Wharf.  Our table overlooked a tiny marina with 6-8 commercial fishing boats.  Took most of lunch to realize the full expanse of the Golden Gate Bridge was just beyond.  Boom, proposal.
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Key West, yep, proposal.  Galveston Bay, where I grew up, of course, a proposal.  Coast of Maine, proposal.  Destin, FL, proposal.  Lake Burton, GA, under a seemingly full Milky Way, proposal.  Flying over Cuba, proposal.  Jamaica, proposal.  Lake Erie, proposal.  Niagara Falls, proposal.  Pittsburgh, Duquesne Incline, proposal.  Moultrie, Georgia, proposal.  The High Line Garden, New York City, a proposal.  Jekyll Island, Georgia, proposal.  More of course, then last December the oddest proposal, but still a surprise, in a parking lot, about to eat at our favorite local Italian restaurant at Lake Oconee.  This time I scared Beloved.  I said, "Yes, and let's put a date on it."
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Weeks passed, and Feb. 1st he said we needed to get serious about a wedding, or it would be another year.  He asked me in all the world where would I like to get married.  The pontoon boat Eco Tour of the St. Johns River we had taken a year earlier had been like entering a hologram from a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History.  But better, it was being part of God's majesty.  Too rare those moments, in our industrialized world.
 
 
 Wedding Reception, above, The Swamp House.
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With less than 2 weeks putting the wedding together, the boat was full.  We hired the boat, Eco Tours, for the normal 2 hour river & wildlife tour.  We chose to be married at the 1 hour point.  Eight minutes into the boat ride, a huge alligator was sunning himself at river's edge.  He clocked in at least 100 years old, indicated by his size.  What a thrill, best wedding ever, at only 8 minutes.
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Manatees, birds, turtles, perfect weather, etc.  On the boat, below, the preacher began the vows with Beloved.  Until that point everything had been perfect.  As Beloved began reciting his vows, tears streamed down his cheeks. Would I even have a voice for mine?  With tears and rough voice I was getting thru my own vows, to Beloved, and made the mistake of looking at our friends filling the pews.  Every face had tears.   
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We get home, and it was a friend remarking about my choosing the St. Johns River.
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Mario Buatta remarked, during the 80's in House & Garden, that we try to recreate the rooms that first impressed us as a child.
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He was right, and I'll add, we try to recreate the garden that first impressed us as a child.
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Why exactly had I chosen the St. Johns River?  It's the closest I've seen since 1966 of what it looked like behind my parents house, on Clear Creek, Nassau Bay, TX.  Where I played.  Nothing had been built yet, it was me and the salt water, marsh, Spanish moss, tropical birds, fish, alligators, scents, the full package, same as the St. Johns River in DeBary, FL.
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My friend understood my choice, before I did.
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The friend making the remark, owns the garden where I met Beloved, below.
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Her garden is, she already knows, my garden too.  Big news about her garden, she doesn't know yet.  Happy and proud it's BIG yet wish it weren't quite so big.  I've made sure there are legal measures in place to keep this BIG news from getting bigger than she would want.  We've got a late morning appointment this Friday to walk her grounds. 
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Pic, above, in the garden where Beloved & I met, and worked.
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Read in the NYTimes, long ago, "The more we go inward, the more we outwardly connect."
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Who knew being in gardens, one at a time, across decades, and continents, would connect to so much ?  Making a life.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Thank you for your outpouring of prayers and thoughts and stories.  You've fortified me with your own strengths and beliefs in God.  Beloved came thru surgery for cancer of the prostate August 1st, pathology report indicating he should now be clear of prostate cancer.  He's still exhausted, sore, incisions healing, rather miserable but in joy at the grace of his outcome.
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They've decided to give him a chemo treatment, beads, for his liver cancer.   His liver transplant should take place in 6-8 months.
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Our friends at home, your generosity of food ministry.  Humbling.  And friends who have already handled intensive caregiving, your love, hugs, advice, knowing laughter, getting me through.

Why You Must Begin Your Garden Now

If you've been wanting to create the garden of your imagination around your home, or even plantscaping your interior, it's time to take action.
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Pic, above, here.
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"Find this
                                    within you,
it travels on the breeze like a ribbon
in search of a home
                 and your work
is to give it one
or it will find another
                    more suited servant."
Street Poet, Keven Devaney
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Now is the time.  You are a well suited servant.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO T
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Pages of paragraphs to add, chapters coalescing.  Each of us born that more-suited-servant, along with free will.  Delineating our narratives, in our garden & home, is done, whether consciously, or subconsciously.  Without words, our delineated narrative is read by all.
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Update, previous post.  Doctor's waiting room.  Another cancer diagnosis for Beloved.  Separate from the first.  He's still active and working full-out until surgery in a few weeks.  Until then we live, love, pray.  Only occasionally having to remember, Just breathe.     

Honoring Darkness: And Thrive

Several hours of serious maybe-life-changing medical waiting rooms yesterday.  Caretaking Beloved, knowing to bring READING.  More than ubiquitous phone reading, needed 'easy thriving profound deep with truths of the ages that settles the heart though topics at times unsettling' type reading.  Ask for anything less?
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Brought one of my journals, and the new testament.  Target hit, an arrow from the journal pierced through making me forget the real-time drama.  Mind to gather resources, from old realms with new perceptions.  Toss in a random reading from Luke and exceeded my mission statement.
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Seriously, who goes to a hospital waiting room without a mission statement?  Sensing how effectively all of life is a Garden Design?  What was the first thing God did for us?  Designed our garden.
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Darkness.  When did we lose 'darkness' as a good word?
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"...darkness --like silence, like solitude--belongs to that class of blessings increasingly endangered in modern life yet vitally necessary to the human spirit."  Maria Popova.
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"For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars -- pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time."  Henry Beston.
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"We live our life in various realms of meaning which do not quite cohere rationally.  Our meanings are surrounded by a penumbra of mystery, which is not penetrated by reason."  Reinhold Niebuhr. 


Pic, above, here.
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Realizing, in my journal yesterday, agrarian Garden Design is good Garden Design for living the night sky, as part of your life.  Certainly, it's been part of mine, though never consciously intuited.
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"Awe enables us to sense in small things the beginnings of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common & simple."  Joshua Heschel Abraham.
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Gardening is walking the talk of thinking.  What should your garden aspire to?  The best within you.*
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This photographer, Matt Albiani, below, gets it about light.  More than shooting the light, or merely another bathroom, shooting light coming from space, thru the garden, and finally onto the bathroom wall.  Albiani shot the eternal, giver of life, light.

 
Pic, above, here.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Just ahead of the gloaming, below.  Painterly shot.  So much action in the stillness.
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"Design at its core, thrives when a human being cares enough to do work that touches another --- it doesn't thrive when it gets more efficient."  Seth Godin.

 
Pic, above, here.
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More than sleep, darkness keeps us healthy in myriad other ways.
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"We have come a long road up from the darkness, and it well may be --- so brief, even so, is the human story --- that viewed in the light of history, we are still uncouth barbarians.  We are potential love animals, wrenching and floundering in our larval envelopes, trying to fling off the bestial past.  Like children or savages, we have delighted ourselves with techniques.  We have thought they alone might free us.  (But) once launched on this road, there is no retreat.  The whirlpool can be conquered, but only by placing it in proper perspective.  As it grows, we must learn to cultivate that which must never be permitted to enter the maelstrom --- ourselves."  Lauren Eiseley.
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Here, in our ca. 1900 home, it is past time to put in the Moon Garden.  To honor darkness.  Gravel, a stone fire ring, chairs, sky, trees, meadow, garden, woodland.
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A life wants to live in me.  My garden lets it grow.  As my garden spoke, it taught my soul to speak.*
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Honor the darkness in your garden.  I have, but didn't know.  Until yesterday & now must have darkness more fully. 
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Neo-sentence via Parker Palmer, spliced with garden.....

Nancy Lancaster: A Layer of Timelessness with Fragrant Plants at the Windows

Haseley Court, below, one of the homes Nancy Lancaster lived in.
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Joy, a jolt of boxes, below, clothed to the ground in proper pruning, instead of meatballs with naked feet.
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Closer to the house, Nancy had a favorite scented plant combination for placement at windows.
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Pic, above, here.
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"...Nancy's imagination was drawn to the details, the little medleys she or a guest might come across as they wandered the park.  As inside the house, every conceivable empty space was an opportunity.  More than in the grand parterre or the terrace, her taste for how a garden ought to be found in small compositions of delicious-smelling nicotiana, heliotrope, lavender, lemon verbena and sweet sultan underneath the windows of the house.  They gave Ditchley the personality she sought.  Spreading and drooping wisteria and jasmine on a wall or around a tree or a Gloire de Dijon rose climbing over a Portland stone pediment, were enlisted in taking a site that was somehow neither of today nor of yesterday and blessing it with an indescribable essence of passing time, time past and timelessness."  Robert Becker, Nancy Lancaster Her Life, Her World, Her Art.  (Yes, you want the book.)
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Nancy's homes & gardens don't push me away, in the least, with their expensive maintenance, and too much stuff.
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Fun is knowing how to take the best of Nancy Lancaster, keeping her garden drama, removing layers of maintenance, yet it's still pure Nancy Lancaster.  With nothing of '...today nor of yesterday and blessing it with an indescribable essence of passing time, time past and timelessness.'
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How is it 'Nancy Lancaster' without all her garden layers?  She worked with the greats, and they never get lost in proper translations.  If they do, it's on us, not them.
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Time.  Timelessness.
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Timelessness is given by gardens, if we play our role correctly.
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From a few quick notes, below, written last week, about a loving timelessness vs. someone else's horrid reality, on 2 small scraps of paper, from an article written by John Gray which included both Blaise Pascal and Marcel Proust, both men I've studied loosely thru the years.
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  If you've made your garden a timelessness proscenium you can go where Proust does, without effort, "Proust's detachment from the haute bourgeois society that is coolly dissected....  The core of Jozef  Czapski's  talks is Proust's portrayal, through his narrator, of the indifference to death that comes when the mind is filled with memories that seem to come unbidden from outside of time."
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"Devoured by a yearning for the absolute, Pascal considered all the ephemeral joys of the senses unacceptable.  For Proust, on the other hand, only the world of the senses existed and had value."
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"...as Pascal turns from the world with disgust, Proust seeks salvation in its fugitive sensations."
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"Czapski was not mistaken in finding in Proust's work a kind of religion not a story of redemption, but a struggle to defy time & disillusion, and eternalize the passing moment in memories of meaning & beauty."  Almost straight from an E.M. Forster novel, Howard's End.
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Czapski, "Born in Prague in 1896, a scion of an old and distinguished family, he graduated in St Petersburg before moving to newly emancipated Poland to take up his studies in art. He spent eight years in cosmopolitan prewar Paris, exchanging ideas with French and Russian artists and writers, forming passionate attachments with both women and men (including one with Vladimir Nabokov’s younger brother Sergey, who would perish in a Nazi camp where gay men were subjected to hideous medical experiments) and devoting himself to realizing a vision of painting he found pursued in the work of Cézanne." 
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Time.  Timelessness, a first choice in Garden Design.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

How to Arrange Furniture in Large Garden Spaces

How to section a large terrace or deck into cozy areas? 
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Learn from the best, below.  Why are they the best?  Their livelihood depends upon layers of good design, ease of maintenance, simplicity for staff to serve, and, enriching comfort for guests.
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Pic, above, here.
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Large pots, multiple seating areas, repetitious furniture, color theme flowing throughout & accouterments. 
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Beautiful pots, furnishings not in the budget?  Field gather, junking/garbage day curb side/thrift stores/garage sales, paint all the furnishing the same color.  Paint all the pots the same color.
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Become a fan of square and rectangular shaped tables.  Square/rectangular tables can be pulled together or set against walls, multi-use. 
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How easy this terrace is to blow.  Few obstructions.  Simple pot plantings.  No major replanting needed at change of seasons.
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At the end of an Open Garden a lone woman remained, sitting on my 6' Teak bench.  Tired, I went straight to her and sat down.  She began to cry.  Heaving breaths, big round tears.
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Divorce finalizing, she was losing her large sacred landscape.  How could she live without it?  Looking around that garden room of mine, she said she had to, ".....HAVE THIS."  The beauty of a garden in its full context.  More tears.
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So, we held hands, she cried a bit more, and I waited, knowing exactly what to say to her.
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"You can have this, my garden is less than 1/4 acre, 8500 SF, and that includes house & driveway."
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Not the first time bearing witness to a woman's life change.
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Never think beautiful garden photographs merely represent what can be done in a garden with $$$, pic above.  Beautiful gardens are about beautiful relationships.  Gardener to Nature. 
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Never saw that woman again.  Yet, I know she's thriving.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T 

Karl Lagerfeld Riffs on Henri Matisse: The HenriKarl Garden

Today I saw the Nature work of Karl Lagerfeld & Henri Matisse, below.
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The HenriKarl Garden.
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Karl, its inventor, got on with it as if merely another breath to take.  None of the baggage Picasso seemed to have with Matisse.



Decades working with show gardens, few know how rare it is to create a show garden, fresh, unique, makes a statement.  More importantly, displays as a garden.





Pics, above, here.
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Why has no one manufactured these garden cutouts of Karl's?  Fake plants are sold, these are better than fake plants, they're Art.  A riff from Karl on Henri.  From their most sacred origins.
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Pic, above, here.
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I'll never forget the Matisse Cut-Outs Show at Atlanta's High Museum.  Seeing the first exhibit, and it takes every fiber of body/mind/spirit merely to remain standing and not fall-out.
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Matisse, above, here.
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Matisse Cut-Outs, above, here.

 
Pic, above, Karl Lagerfeld quote, here.
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Trinity of Matisse quotes, above, from, here.
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Seriously, why has no one manufactured and sold the HenriKarl Garden Cut-Outs?
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

"I Want to Have a Relationship With You"

The physical of a garden is obvious.  House, meadow, hedge, porch with table/chair/vase, color, form, texture, flow, breeze, sound, temperature, scent,
implied actions. 
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This garden, below, becomes interestingly intentional if there's a cluster mansion just the other side of the hedge.  Indicative of clear choices made with a firm hand.  And life.
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Odd, the alchemy of hedge & meadow creating expansive space, physically & mentally.
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Pic, above, here.
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Nature takes the physical of a garden, metaphysical.  Psychologists proclaim a: 'Fertile Solitude = Basic Unit of a Full & Contented Life.'
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About solitude in Nature, "...one's inner voices become audible (and) in consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives."  Wendell Berry.
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Porch & garden, above, give layers of fertile solitude & the sound of our own inner voice, merely from a photograph.  This garden, above, is totally designed, though looks not designed in the least.  "Intelligence + Diligence + Wisdom  vs.  Letting It Be."  No one needs to be a garden expert to know what a letting-it-be attitude does to a landscape.
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"We die.  That may be the meaning of life.  But we do language.  That may be the measure of our lives."  Toni Morrison.  Gardens were a language long before man arrived.
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Deciding to have a Garden is 2nd order positive thinking.  "A real advantage is conferred on people who can do things that are 1st-order negative, 2nd-order positive.  Especially if these 1st order negatives are very visible costs with no immediate benefit in the short term and a non-linear benefit at some future time."  Shane Parrish. 
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A previous client moved from their home/garden 2 years ago.  Recently, near that home, I did the stupid thing, a drive-by.  Foot went to brake, and I just stared.  Their garden, on the edge of out-of-control, had bushes screaming, "Come, prune us, you'll have a nice couple of hours, and that problem you're most worried about, it will be solved when the pruning is done, your house will be framed in love again, and your attitude lifted, nurtured."  More precisely, I kept thinking, Don't you see, don't you hear? Your Garden is shouting in joy to you, "I want to have a relationship with you."
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Seriously, I saw their garden communicating with them, heard the exact words, "I want to have a relationship with you." 
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"...clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life."  Parker Palmer.  Gardens are 2nd-order positive thinking.  How odd to finally 'hear' a quote from a Garden, "I want to have a relationship with you.", yet it was someone else's garden, speaking to them, not me.  I got the metaphor. 
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You may not hear the Garden speaking to you, 'I want to have a relationship with you'.  Be assured, it is. 
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Truth: Where Your Garden Design Begins

"......the facial feathers fanned into a sonic satellite dish dispersing sound to unlevel ears, one positioned higher than the other to help the owl locate its prey in three dimensions."  Maria Popova.
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Makes perfect sense.  Truth.

 
Pic, above, here. 
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Too often, truth is not our starting point, instead, we settle for facts.  Facts comfortably turned into information.  Worse, information elevated to wisdom.     
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I knew the garden, above, had a truth.  What?  I could not articulate it, nor create it.  Too busy using that American Horticulture degree, with its starting point a pure 180 from the truth, above.   Off to the historic gardens across Europe for 2 decades.  Truth was intuited in the first garden the first trip.  How could I not go back so often.  Now?  The imperative is to design gardens.

Garden Design is not a voodoo, let me make this up, oh I love plants x--y--z......, I must adhere to the HOA, these plants are on sale so they're perfect, let me do what my neighbors do and other such 'wisdom' without a base in truth.
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Each layer of Garden Design flows from a truth.  Great news, it means you've got this.  Better, you're working with Providence and centuries of the greatest Garden Design minds Earth has known. 
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In America, a Garden Design truth, above, most often not 'seen'.  How can you begin your Garden Design if you don't know the ears must be unlevel?   
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Truth, above, Garden Design begins inside your home, looking out.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

How to Start Your Garden Design: 101

Once you've toured historic gardens across Europe, twice minimum, a theme appears from the oldest, 2-4 centuries, gardens.  The oldest garden design theme is a template, process, equation, road map, truth, facts, information, trinity, whatever you wish to name it, and finally, what I name it, Wisdom.
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Pic, above, here.
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If we're lucky, we understand.  If luckier, we intuit Wisdom.
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You're looking at a garden design, above, using every element of the oldest gardens.  Can you name the trinity?
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If Earth's oldest gardens are a trinity, "Why not start a garden with what it ends with?"
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What are you looking at, above?  Trees, meadow, stone focal point.  Historic trinity of garden design, trees can be formal, above, or an existing wild wood.  Meadow can be pasture, or lastly, lawn, myriad shapes, or formal lines.
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Stone focal point, often a dried fountain, long ago unable to hold water, balustrades, terrace, plinth, folly, urn, statue, ruins of a stone house/castle.
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Trees are most often forest, a wild wood, bosque, nothing showy, yet with canopy & understory.
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A decade passed before understanding Wildwood next to Meadow.  Do you know the significance?  .
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Wildwood next to Meadow is maximum pollinator habitat, gift from Providence for survival.
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Recently, a new fact I discovered about trees, and Providence,

 "Other than God and people, the Bible mentions trees more than any other living thing."  Matthew Sleeth.
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Did you know that?  Matthew Sleeth, also linked to Charles Spurgeon, The Trees in God's Court. 
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Do you know who the garden, above, belongs to?  Have seen it several times thru the years, online, this time with provenance, Valentino's, Chateau de Widevill.
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Oddly, the trinity of Trees-Meadow-Stone Focal Point is greatly suited toward mid-century ranch homes & the flurry of split-level 70's-80's homes, calming industrialized architecture with agrarian/pastoral grace.  All homes & price points, not merely grand estates. 
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Why, exactly, start your garden design with what it will end with?  Less maintenance & expense, reduced HVAC with shade in summer, sun in winter, mental health benefits of beauty, physical health benefits Providence designed into our microbiomes without which we become ill or die.  Earth friendly, no fertilizers/chemicals toxic to groundwater, fungi, bacteria, agriculture, insects, wildlife, humans.  Friendly to even, yes, deer & armadillo, without noticeable damage. 
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Next layer, if you wish more in your garden, go for it, have fun.  No worries, if it fails, history proves it will, you'll still have a gorgeous garden Trees/Meadow/Stone Focal Point friendly to Nature, Earth and You.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T       

A (BETTER) New Way: Outdoor Container Plantings

Traditional container gardening met Deborah Silver, Dirt Simple.  In an act of agape love, traditional container gardens said, Bring it On !!  It was time.  Cliche, trite, uninspired one of many trinities describing traditional container gardens.
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With that agape love, and great skill, Deborah looked at traditional container gardens with a floral designers eye.  The entire silhouette from bottom of pot, sides of pot, rim of pot, plantings at pot rim, how the plantings taper upward away from the pot and the scale of width and height to pot, plinth, plantings, house, garden, sky.  Within the silhouette Deborah had a new vision for specific plantings, their texture, color, form, no holds barred.
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Once I saw Deborah's container plantings, it was immediate love.  With immediate passing of old ways.



At change of seasons I always head to Deborah Silver's blog, wanting to see her latest planting/pot arrangements.  Years of this, never disappointed.



In Deborah's latest post she refers to her tallest container planting layer as, Farmed Twigs.  Big day, learning a new gardening term.



Love a new style not needing a 'class'.  See it, do it.



Notice the plinths Deborah chooses for her pots.  Not merely getting the pots to the right height, they accentuate the silhouette.
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Deborah's pots aren't container gardening, but arrangements, changing the container gardening genre.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Agape love?  I bow down to Deborah's skill, and give great good thanks.  Seems so simple seeing her work, yet, no one else thought of it in several centuries.
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All pics from Deborah's website via Pinterest.

Do You Have Poyeema With Your Garden?

Last year, in Texas again, caretaking mom, days began early & ended late.  Mom was constant care, I was up 4:30-5am to get in my 'reading' before she awoke.  Those mornings were spent in the formal living room, unchanged since 1965, facing Galveston Bay, and a rising sun.  Coffee, journal, pen, reading on the phone. 


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One of those mornings, 7-15-18 in my journal, a word I knew existed, had to, hunted for, but never found, was finally discovered in a link within someone's comment on a political blog.     
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Gardening needs a word for its action steps, aka, working in the garden or garden chores.  Needed articles, but within reason, not-all-the-time.  Gardening is the art treated as a PSA equal to, use sunscreen, eat right, don't smoke.  Drive thru neighborhoods and how many good gardens do you see?  This doesn't include gardens solely well maintained, or merely matching HOA rules, but truly good gardens, beauty upon this Earth, and in our lives. 
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Decades looking, I found the word describing 'my' time in the garden.


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Poyeema.  It's Greek.  Do you know it?  I had never seen 'poyeema' written or heard it spoken.  Yet I have lived its meaning.  The link I followed, here. 
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Poyeema is mentioned twice in the bible. 
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"In Romans 1:18-20 the Apostle Paul declares that ungodly men are “without excuse” because they are surrounded by the evidences of the Creator’s “eternal power and Godhead.”

Our Authorized Version calls the creation, in this passage, “the things that are made,” but in the Greek it is called literally “the poyeema,” from which we get our word poem. The Apostle refers, of course, to the harmony of God’s creation, and is it not indeed amazing how billions of heavenly bodies can continually revolve in the vastness of space and never collide! And are not the flowers, the seasons, the sunsets all part of a harmonious creation, which God alone could have conceived and set to music?", here. 

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"Ephesians 2:10 – For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

The word “workmanship” is the Greek word poyeema and means a thing made, a thing produced, with effort and design. In Ephesians 2:10, poyeema literally is in reference to us who are His masterpieces. We can literally define the word poyeema as poetry in motion for our lives are ordained by God", here. 

'Romans is a poem of creation, and Ephesians is a poem of redemption...'
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Years of gardening poyeema on my blog, in my books, on my TV show, at my lectures, in client gardens.  A poetry of workmanship.  Joy in the doing, grace in the results.
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How to garden?  The 'traditional' method of garden writing?  Not my niche.  But I do have a favorite 'traditional' how-to garden writing resource, she talks to your intellect, and life.
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Ca. 1998 I had the good fortune to hear Margaret Roach speak in Atlanta, she had just written a book, A Way to Garden.  Margaret was perfection.  Then something awful happened, but good too I suppose, she received a promotion at Martha Stewart.  Martha knew a good thing.  But it hemmed Margaret, in my opinion.  Finally, Margaret retired from Martha Stewart and began her blog, A Way to Garden.  Lucky us. 


All pics, above, from A Way to Garden, about Jenny Elliot of Tiny Hearts Farm.
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Humbling to realize Providence created all in grace, and poetry of workmanship, for us, yet went further, giving us our own poyeema, to take, or not.  The poetry and workmanship are there, awaiting, whether we believe, or not.
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Have you had this?  Poyeema, maybe never thought about it but knew there was something there, something without words, but every good feeling?
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So went my days last year, caretaking mom, epiphanies, laughter, hardwork, tears, joy, grace.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Notice the dry humor about finding poyeema?  Sure, let's look in the comments of a political blog, find a link, take the link, and there it is.....the big shiny sparkling word searched for decades..... 
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TV show?  That was awhile ago, hosting my own show on CBS and a lot of fun, and I approached it with a mission statement full of poyeema.
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Who's the lucky one reading this far already knowing poyeema?