Ernest Hemingway, "Never mistake motion for action."
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If you're working in your garden, and it's easy, you're probably doing it wrong. Looking back at the early years of gardening, in my 20's, what would I tell that girl? Most of gardening is counterintuitive. Copy historic gardens from Europe. Choose the simplest solution. Keep your love affair with plants last on the priority list, top your plant list with those-great-bores performing against, drought, flood, deer, disease, insects, with little maintenance. Do not design your garden from the street, stand inside your house, look out the windows, and begin designing the garden.
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Question pretty garden pictures, are they supporting the house, property values, Nature, and lives of those in the home?
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Pretty garden/home, above. But. If the sidewalk/street is at the front, move the hedge forward along the sidewalk/street, replace a central part of the turf with more paving, turn a couple of those windows into doors, and create a courtyard, espalier a flowering evergreen woody shrub against the solid wall for instant lush with little maintenance, choose comfortable seating, and small tables at the chairs for easy outdoor dining, and......
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Past my 20's I cannot look at garden pics without the brain overlay. Better, it's not personal, the ideas are all historic, done for centuries.
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How many other ways to historically change this sweet garden, above?
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Many.
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This is my idea for a garden show, have 10 entries do the same project. Would be happy to do all 10 myself. That would be fun, challenging myself, making each one sublime. But I would still want to see how 10 other people would do it. Am selfish that way, always wanting to see more, learn more. Always.
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How would you change this garden, above?
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Garden & Be Well, XO T
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Pic from here. I have a Pinterest board, Changes, filled with good gardens I would like to tweak.
What an interesting house - does it have a roof garden? That looks like an urn on the roof.
ReplyDeletetesting. wrote a big long comment and blogger erased!
ReplyDeleteSomehow, someway I would make it more private. I'm all about the privacy, the security in this stage of life. Plus, that house looks extremely tiny.
ReplyDeleteEnjoying this topic, and I had the same wild idea some time ago to do just that - edit gardens, where more is worth keeping than not, rare here!
ReplyDeleteI even thought of doing that as some of my design business. Especially for retail properties, giving the owner just enough to chew on, and the rest if they hired me. Never had the time, and based on what I see with giving things away or cutting fees, it would net more, not better, clients.
Back to your example - it would take a more-sophisticated-than-usual property owner to do something meaningful as you suggest. Most seem to gravitate towards the extremes of trendy 100% redos or baby steps.
The 10 designs seems like a great idea. You could learn so much just trying to figure them all out.
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