How to Have Beautiful Easy Winter Pots in Your Garden

 The identity I brought to my garden is not the one my garden wanted.  Creating what the garden desires is slow joyful work.  Somewhere along the way my garden brought into me, with a fullness of intent, my identity.

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Amusing to remember that earlier time, thinking I was the potter.

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Humbled at a skill taking me from being the potter, to being the clay.  Thankful for the journey, blessed by the lesson.

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Certainly I knew potted plants.  Everywhere to see.  Follow their methods with tweeks of intent and what's available.

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Decades of recreating those type pots.  No more.  A few years ago I discovered Deborah Silver's pots.  Deborah's heart & eye those of a florist.  Hilarious how obvious her art.  That's the magic.  Simple.  Deborah put florist and garden together, in her pots.  More, she does it in horrendous weather, bitter winters, strong winds.     

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Deborah's pots, below, copy how she creates them, and they're yours forevermore.  Each pot you create, your heart and hands, and what's available.

  

Pot plantings, above/below, are cut greenery, fake stems, real stems.  Hope pics/words have already expanded your horizons.  Well beyond my own. 

 

 "Sometimes it takes darkness & the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you."  David Whyte.

   

Deborah's pics are your visual curriculum, all above/below.  Adore visual curricula, from childhood.

  

Without words my best conversations are in the garden.  Life abounds where it is pastured.  My garden pastures my body, my soul.  I haven't the knowledge or wisdom from within to gain what my garden provides, nurturing & ripe.

 

 More fake and real greenery, above/below.

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"Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness."  Alain de Bottom.  Art is a tool.  Without art we live in the depths of unwisdom.  

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Oh my the horror of a garden labeled, mundane, or ubiquitous.  This is your garden to fill.  

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Full post from Deborah Silver, here, about putting together Winter Garden Pots.

  

"The quality of her dreaming, its interior abstraction, is exquisite.  Its wonder lies in how closed its shutters are to any mundane world."  Renee Gladman.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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For your continued prayers I thank you.  Beloved has more liver cancer tumors.  Back to the hospital for full anesthesia, again again again, this year.  This time in December.  Aside from the macro drama, Beloved rises each day and goes to work.  In the micro we speak of it little.  Choosing our lives instead.  

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This time, alert siren heard differently.  Two short conversations, life without blinders.  We go to sleep, I await his steady breathing.  I go into the living room.  To cry.  To pray.  It passes, I go back to bed.

Landscape Ethics: What Are Yours? Where Do You Apply Them?

 With your garden, has a choice been made?  Your approach, is it: physical, joyful, literary, moral, and ethical?  Had you already put all of this to words?  From tricycle days, I knew without words, primal abiding is outside. 

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Landscape ethics, what are yours?  Can you list 3, now, in the order of importance to you?  Are you living your landscape ethics in the fullness of your heart? Which layers elude you?  What can you change to get there?  For you.

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No one gets their beautiful garden without redemption.  In the beginning, you go into your garden to change it.  Visions of a paradise.  With good fortune, a few years pass, many unforeseen changes made, and, finally beauty, paradise formed.  Along the way, you realize, the garden changed you.   

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'Your paradise is a quality of life; but, deeper than that, it's your life.'  P. O'Tuama

  

Pic, above, here. 

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Tell me again, above, how important foundation plantings are.  What is the safety clinging to them?  Will foundation plantings get you paradise? 

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"Paradise", comes into Latin & Greek & English, through an early Iranian language, Avestan, which is the language of the scriptures, of Zoroastrian, and, it means, "an enclosed garden."  P. O'Tuama. 

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Pic, above, here. 

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" This poem isn't sentimental.  This poem is saying, here is what it's like to hold  paradise, when you know you live in a reality that people would want to steal your paradise, steal your life."  P. O'Tuama

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'Steal your life', for too many, is literal, and for too many, metaphor.  

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"...and sometimes a poet, if they want to make a serious point about politics, will enter into that serious point thru a side door, and they might describe something of landscape or something of memory or something of joy, but there's a line in it that strikes home, because that line is telling a deep political truth around which everything else gathers."  P. O'Tuama.

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Pic, above, here.

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At the front end, planning/planting your landscape is thrilling.  You are in charge.  You have the control.

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 "To know what is coming is to perceive control; and the mind is all about control, particularly in the cerebral, capitalist, goal-oriented global north.  We want to control, or, in neuroscientific terms, we want to exercise cognitive control, our mysterious ability to behave in accord with the goals we set.  ....for, ultimately, humans want to control the future, or to believe that they can."  Anna Badkhen

  

Pic, above, here.

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Walls of trees, walls of hedges, stone hallway to the door, above, Tara Turf lawn, art against the wall (properly plinthed), completing the room.  Simplicity.  Yet not.  Pollinator habitat, fruiting orchard, a room with layers of ethics and meaning.  Something else about these types of landscapes, above.  They're the most likely to survive for centuries.  

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Tara Test Questions: What are the layers of ethics?  What are the layers of meaning?  How is this orchard generating maximum production?  At its most basic level, Landscape Ethics spill upward throughout our lives.  We're gifted the joyful beginning, more, grace.

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Pic, above, here.

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Your life, above/below, is the focal point of your Landscape Ethics.  From the fungi in the soil, lizard on the wall, blossoms, bees, birds, your home and how it's situated in your garden, how you see your garden while sitting inside your home.

  

Pic, above, here.

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Did a double take at this garden, above.  Created same Landscape for a client.  She'll be sending me a note after seeing the pic.  Proud to have created a landscape to survive centuries.  Yet, no worries if it's paved over in 20 years for a road.  I've done my duty.  

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"A lot of problems happen because of your internal state.  When you're calm, happy, and fulfilled you don't pick fights, create drama, or keep score."  S. Parrish.

  

Pic, above, here.

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Since those tricycle days, pure joy taking hold of Landscape Ethics.  Didn't know at the outset the Landscape was putting Ethics into me.  Nor how many years the process.  The ride has given a primal challenge, primal effort, primal abiding, and a primal redemption.

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A lot, yes.  Yet not the biggest Landscape Ethics gift discovered.  Do you know?

 

  

Pic, above, here.

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From the start, while I was fiddling with control, my garden had already set its mission.

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Do you know?  Took a few decades for me.

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Love.  In the garden, it is this simple.  Whether you think so or not. 

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Abiding love.  The type of love given to all.  Agape love.     

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This precious child, above, knows.

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"...an older writer friend tells me that the role of a writer in America today is to help the readers be less affraid." A. Badkhen.  In the garden I can better articulate my sorrow or fear,  and it's diminished.

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"The sages interpret the fable thusly: to truly pray we must first achieve a state of exultation, which means that joy, not sorrow, brings man closer to God.  Poets help us make our prayers heard." A. Badkhen.

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In the garden, is your poetry.  Your prayers.  Joy.  Love.

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Garden & Be Well,  XO T

How to Take Charge of Your Garden: Foundation Hedges

 At first glance, below, 'in love'.  Those hedges !  The dining room.  The furniture.  The Color choices: historic, Green-Brown-White.

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Imagine, in your mind's eye, removing the hedges, below.  What do you see?  You see a mess.  Next, keep the hedges, and remove all the perennials planted behind them.  What do you see?  You see a tidy, more open version: neater.

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You start gardening with your own  stamp and heroics, a decided idea of what will be new & best.  Best ever.  A season passes, and you see every effort, every dollar, your divine master piece, is all a sham.  Worse, it's the most heroic sham ever.  Did you out perform me in this arena?  I adore you.

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Worse, you go back to those 'ridiculous' Garden Design Rules, realizing they aren't there to constrict you.  They liberate you.  Interesting.  What you thought shackles, you learn is freedom.

  

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Keeping the hedges, above, remove the perennials, and add a few cone shaped evergreens and pleached trees.  Pleached trees and shaped evergreens, below.

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Pic, above, here.

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Having perennials for decades, then dispensing with them, planting flowering shrubs, having them for decades, now they're mostly being dispensed with too.  Didn't see this coming.   Why the newest change?

Deer proofing, and ease-of-care, Aging in Place.  Importantly, choose for pollinators in each incarnation.  You realize, this is not a 'less than' choice.  It's the richest choice you can make.

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I'm stripping my garden to its barest form, yet not reducing its benefit to pollinators, property value, reducing HVAC costs, nor the love my heart partakes, having found the universal-in-the-particular.

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 Pic, above, here. 

Simplicity, above, pure stage craft.  The stage is yours.  Pieces sited to leverage your life in joy & beauty.

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Reading, early morning, recently, came across this, "It has been said that once a woman reaches a certain age, life provides only two consolations -- gardening or God."  Ambra Edwards.  

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Blessedly, didn't have to wait to reach a 'certain age'.  Gardening and God have given decades of joy, challenge, vocation/avocation, epiphanies, friends, a life in full.

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"I gardened all the time: it was physically, emotionally and intellectually satisfying -- all of it." Penelope Hobhouse.

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Garden & Be Well,  XO  Tara

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How did I ever dislike hedges !  True.

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Yes, used bottom 2 pics before.  They're that good in simplicity, the garden design can be inserted myriad places.  

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Hedges, 2+ centuries ago were not purely for aesthetics.  Hedges had to pay their rent, keeping chickens out of the potager plantings.   Best to get rid of your mentally 'ideal' hedge plants, unless they are size appropriate & native (or provide like a native) & deer proof & to your zone.  

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Without the hedge, top pic, the Garden Design falls apart, worse, in winter, it's a ravaged off season view.  This is Part I: Hedges Around the House