How to Design a Landscape: Collect Moments Not Plants

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.  It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."  Mark Twain.
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What is the greatest thing you need to know about gardening?  Unlearn the loud majority.  Listen to your inner knowledge.  Not brain knowledge.  Unfortunately, knowledge from your soul has little language.  No worries, the garden you want speaks easily in pictures.  Pictures you already know.  They've attracted your heart for years, probably decades.      
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Perhaps your partner won't like it, your neighbors, or it's illegal to your HOA.  Maybe someone will complain, and a man with a gun & badge will knock on your door.  Yes, all of these have happened to me.  Except the second gun/badge arriving into my garden were worn by a woman.  Police thoughts?  Both were pi$$ed.  At the complainer.  And, apologized for having to bother me.
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Really, those are the negatives about creating the garden your soul wants?  Few & paltry.  My garden has been in magazines/books, on tv, and several tours.  Again, paltry.  Daily, for decades, my garden gives me moments.  Moments that release the bonds of time, mere human reality, hunger, tiredness, sorrows, questions I'm unable to answer receive answers and more.
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I garden for these moments.  Richness without price.  Tasha Tudor signed off often with words from a poem, "Take joy."  I got the memo immediately.  Joy is present, always.



Photographer, Clive Nichols, got the memo.  He's been shooting garden moments for decades.
How did he know my predilections, above, for fall's senescence?



Small drops of dew, above, tiny diamonds of light, lasting mere seconds.



Don't have the budget for, above/below?  Ironic, use your brain, 'No grit, no pearl.'



"People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love."  Claude Monet.
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Enough.  Go garden.  Take joy.  Quotes, above, a tiny sliver of joys learned in my garden.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO T
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Clive Nichols pics from his website, here.