One of the best landscapes, below, I know.
A landscape NOT to be used in national magazines. Why? Tara Turf & G*d's Dirt.
This is real landscaping. She's into her 60's, busy & on a tight budget. Watering, chemicals, fertilizer? Not needed here.
Don't look dear viewers lest pics of G*d's Dirt offend. Tara Turf + G*d's Dirt.
(National magazines, large audience garden radio shows, Mr. Testosterone-On-Wheels-Mow-Blow-Go-Comodify-Everything-I-Touch, & nurseries would have to change their business model for my type of gardening. Not much to sell. Yet my business model supports me.)
Roundabout with focal point, above/below.
A Landscape Design feature 1,000's of years old.
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Why pimp it for a tidy monoculture lawn needing weekly mowing, edging, water, chemicals, fertilizer, lacking fragrance, change thru the seasons & pollinators?
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How we treat our pollinators is how we treat ourselves.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Do you know the science of Mary's garden vs. the typical national magazine garden? Cytokines released by myriad plants in nature boost white blood cell counts, fighting cancer. Monocultures reduce nature's bounty. Read this study recently. Had no idea, prior, about our symbiotic relationship to myriad plantings.
11 comments:
This is my kind of garden. Peaceful, quiet, not fussy or over manicured. A place I would enjoy wandering through, or sitting still in to enjoy the moment and the beauty around me. A lady gardener after my own heart.
FlowerLady
If I ever sat still I would do it here! Lovely!
I am a member of this club. It was a gradual shift and then off the cliff: no grass AT ALL! I fell in love with woody plants (and Michael Dirr more than a little bit) and now my trees, shrubs (big shout out to viburnams!) are my stars. All of the gravel pathways are three feet deep and tied into french drains.
My last big rock project was to terrace my sloping front yard and I built in a lowered "pond" of gravel and stone to function as a dry stream bed and to satisfy my lawyer husband's need now to have a real pond in an unfenced area. Now mowing, no chemicals, plants designed to feed birds (and no bird feeders) in a natural way. At almost 62, the leaf raking is a bit much and we may need help with that down the road. Small price to pay for a green oasis that I call my oxygen farm.
I read that Helen Mirren was asked how to achieve elegance, and she said, "simplicity and imagination." You have it here.
Thanks; particularly for all you have been posting in the past few days. Would appreciate a plan of your own plot at some stage so mentally can place all the photos into a spatial relationship.
Don't know if you saw this about Margie Ruddick in the NY Times yesterday:
In Philadelphia, Going Green or Growing Wild?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/garden/in-philadelphia-a-garden-grows-wild.html?hpw
Can you please post the link to the study? Or let us know where you found it? I'd be very interested in reading it. Not at all surprised.
Hi Tara, I have loved all of your posts. We may have been separated at birth or Great minds think alike!
Thanks, Keep up the good fight!
Standing! Clapping! I always wondered why people make gardening so much harder than it need be. Plants have survived on their own for centuries without my help; I just contribute my own form of benign neglect. No, it won't be magazine worthy the way my hosts' house was this evening, but it is what makes my garden my "church". Keep on preachin' & teachin'!
Enjoyed looking at the big versions and identifying various trees and shrubs. The dogwood in the first photo must be at least 40years old.
We'll always have mown grass because it holds the place together. Otherwise, vines take us here in the jungle. Centipede is crawling into my beds and dichondra is turfing up the bahai and centipede out in the lawn. It's all green.
We do mow our "Terry Turf." Our backyard mole has gone gonzo. I wonder it it's a prediction for winter weather.
So, I wonder if some of my English Ivy infested wooded area can become Tara Turf? Hmmmm - time to pull out the mower and give it a try!
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