Color: Counterintuitive Paint Trim

Happy charmer, below.  Makes me want to go inside. 
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See a change, an easy change too, making the roof higher and house taller?
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Once I tell you the change, you won't believe me.
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But, true nonetheless.
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Know?


Pic, above, here.
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Paint the trim at roof line, a tone darker than the siding or a darker tone from the roofing material.  Seems counterintuitive.
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White jumps forward, and pulls down, at roof line.  Darker tones heighten a home by a 1', or more.  Promise.
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Can't finish without mentioning the 'Welcome' sign.  Banal.  Dinky is Stinky.
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Especially here.  The front door is screaming 'Welcome !' with incredible class & elegance.  Why diminish that impact?
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Be wary putting words into your garden.  Can be done well, but with care.
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Favorite sign in a garden?  Tea Room & Toilets .
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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More rabbit holes in this photo.  Those delicious lights, too perfect.  But, that is gardening.  Layers of delight here.

Garden Design Class in a Single Pic

Hello gorgeous, below.
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You got me with your almost brutally modern architecture, smashed into historic Garden Design.
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Then you dropped those orbs with a glint of art nouveau reverie taking a ride with Tinkerbell.
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Your furniture borders on cliche excepting it's an ode to cubism.
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Well do I appreciate the hands & intent pruning, a cocky marvel, to those who know.
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Finally, ending with how lush can you be with the smallest amount of input.
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You're darn tooting I want to see the rest of the garden.
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Pic, above, here.
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Adore garden pics telling a story, and teaching a Garden Design class.
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What do you see, above?
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T

Front Porch: Color, Shutters, Narrative

In a subdivision, below, without the trees you would see neighbor's houses from the front porch.

Whenever you see the gardener, dressed up/down, she's arrayed in black/white.  With a bit of bling too, but you knew that from her front porch.

The shutters are bi-fold doors from a closet.  Ick to fab !

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Color, seating, flow, layers, texture, invitation, relaxation, all ages, conversation, dining, narrative.

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Which shouts loudest?

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I adore the narrative, above.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning:

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Enlarging Corners

Hired for the Garden Design I could not ignore the pool decking.

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Pool is Olympic in scale yet the decking was Liliputian.

The mortar isn't even dry, above.
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Will go back this spring for full photo shoot with more enlarged corners, rims and furnishings styled.
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Have enlarged corners for driveways too.  Perfecto!
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pic in client garden.  Love pics full of narrative or, like this one, a 'see it & do it', no explanation needed.  
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.

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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

Using Color Restraint with Intensity

Intense restraint and another example of the color trinity green-brown-white.

Restraint so intense the terrace has become a proscenium for guests.
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Subtlety so rich the bluestone & granite become focal points.
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Humbling execution.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pic Wendy Posard and Associates.  Definite teamwork between architect & owners.
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2 Tara Dillard questions a patio must answer, 'Is this patio so fabulous I must see inside the house?', 'Is this patio so incredible I must see the garden?'.  Yes & yes.

Creating Lush

Vertical lawn, below.

Don't have a stone villa?  Espalier a woody shrub.  No wires or trellis needed.

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Oddly, the perfection above is undone without the  rattan chair.  Then it becomes an ad for patio furniture.

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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara

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Those white cushions?  Not in my garden, crape myrtle tree debris would win in a day!

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How lush can a garden be and have very little?  That is the best gardening question.  This garden, above, wins.

Pic Veranda magazine.

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.
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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

Garden Design + Interior Design

Garden Design begins inside your home.  Ginger Barber interior design, below.

If the lane is indeed a dirt drive to this home I, seriously,  swoon.
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A trinity for Barber's work, " Designing beach houses, farm house and ruralist." 
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In a single picture, above, a several week class on garden design & interior design can be taught.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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pic Ginger Barber.   First seen at Cote de Texas.  Pure vanishing threshold.

How to Get Guests to the Front Door Instead of the Back Door

Welcome to the front door.   Many park here, below, the family parking court, then walk to the back door.

Perhaps a pair of historic marble urns at the granite step?  An invitation of welcome to the front door.  Not in the original plan but something shouting possibility.

By car, above/below, a drop off at the brick path.  Another possibility shouting!

Front door, above.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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History & subtlety are major goals in this garden.  For decades I've known if mistakes are made they must be on the side of Too Simple.  Easier & cheaper to add something later than to undo paths, trees, bushes....  This isn't a mistake merely the garden speaking its wisdom and us paying attention.

Perfect Front Porch

Of course the patina of the rooster is white.  It's her theme.

To the left of their front door, below.

To the right of their front door, below.

Mary Poppins said it best, "Practically perfect in every way."
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pic same garden as previous post.

Basement Door is now the Dowager's Porch

It's common to see a basement door with lawn.  And nothing else.

Mother-in-law Suite doesn't aptly describe this rendition.

Common furnishings, off the shelf shutters, a simple arbor, concrete pavers & voila !

Color theme was chosen and leveraged with punches of yellow.

Boxwoods, liriope, hollies prettier AND easier to maintain than ubiquitous lawn.  Notice, above, the garbage can?

Between driveway & Dowager's Porch is a tiny foyer, above.  Gravel, above, pure brilliance.
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Most basement doors are the throw-away-zone.  Worse, the criminal zone.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics taken last weekend at the Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival.  This garden belongs to Jeri Farmer, co-founder of the PMHF with Susanne Hudson.  Susanne helps Jeri with her Garden Design.  

Japanese

Invitation.  

 "...eternals as applicable in the smallest of spaces as in the vast acres of a country house garden." Sir Roy Strong.  Above, vast as a mountain range.

Water Mirror, miroir d'eau, above.

Water breaks the footprint of the Tea House, above.  Small touch, huge impact.

Looking outward, above, from the bamboo window seen coming in the entry, top pic.

Framing the view, above, for centuries this has been done.  Is a brick ca. 1960 ranch less worthy?

Hidden, then meandering, above, then spilling into the pond, below.

Why, above, do we like walking on water?

 At the minimum, 2 stones.  Male & female.  Earth & sky.  Ying & yang.  Even the shadows are benevolent.

Leaving the Japanese garden from its other side, above, into a pecan orchard.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pics taken Massee Lane Garden last weekend.

Pot Planting

A bit of clipping, drip irrigation, enjoy.

                               Oh my, the dappled light.
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I haven't put an annual in my pots for decades.  Magazines & nurseries push-push-push annuals.  And I listen to what I'm asked for EVERY design, 'my landscape must be low maintenance & not expensive.'
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Gravel to the house, bushes in pots, necessity furnishings for meals, entertaining, relaxing.  Why are so many Americans afraid, above, of this?  "Let's build a deck, make it too small, add built-in seating with the rail which won't ever see use......"  "We'll pour a cement patio barely big enough for a mop, Weber grill, round table + 4 chairs."
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Pic via Desde My Ventana

Wire Chairs & Color Echoes

Those chairs !

Echoing in titillation the color of the square planter, blue stone terrace & into the distance with the door.

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Even the gardener is color echoed with the landscape.

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Do not underestimate that last bit.  Monet had his gardeners wear blue shirts.

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Of course the white blossoms & silver foliage echo pop.

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Garden & Be Well,          XO Tara

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Found the pic last weekend via Dirt Simple.  Layers of green, canopy & understory trees, shrub walls, flooring & etc of perfection.  This garden has been loved into being with a sure hand.

Front Porch

A disintegrating brick, too small, front stoop when I arrived.

Covered, lighting, doors, stone terrace, new paint colors, columns, iron rail, ceiling fans, furniture.

   The view, below, has been there, ignored, for over 3 decades.

Now it's honored, and lived in.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pics taken this week at a past client.  Her house & garden the most perfect HORRENDOUS before.  Of course she's going to be a before/after story.  Best part is how it's changed their lives.  Literally.  House is amongst many in a subdivision near town, yet it lives like Piedmont forest. 

A Secondary Front Porch

Near the front door, is

 another door.

 Another welcome.

Black, white, green.  She keeps playing with color trinities.  Yes, more of Jeri's garden from previous posts.
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There is no part of Jeri's garden left 'undone'.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara

Richness In Simplicity

Simplicities in my house, below, intensify

 my garden view.

Landscapes & interiors are double axis.
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How does your landscape look from inside your home?  It is art on the wall at every window.  Whether you think so or not.
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How does your home look from your landscape?  It is the focal point of your landscape.  Whether you think so or not.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics taken yesterday, a gray day with rain.  No flash for the pics.  Light streaming in, indirectly, from the garden.  My floor, banister, stairs, and me, each bathed in garden light.

Historically Siting Bulbs

Hillary Clinton had 'intellectual exercise' conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt.  Remember those headlines? 

 Oddly, I got it.  Even then.

Last month I sited thousands of bulbs after "consulting the genius of the place."  I've spoken with landscapes for decades.  
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This garden, above pics, has a historic home with little but its pecan orchard intact.
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Next year anyone seeing the drifts of daffodils will think they've been there a century.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Many of you have this skill, "consulting the genius of the place", but don't trust it.  It's why I listen so hard to landscape questions.  The answers are already in the question. 
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Yes, Alexander Pope...Consult the genius of the place......

Enlarging A Front Porch

Ubiquitous rectangular home with a jailed-in front porch. American Builder's Special. Ugh.Remove chunks of railing and disgusting foundation plantings, widen steps, add flagstone landing.
Now, a front porch to enjoy.


I've removed so many porch rails for clients I've lost count.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Same garden as previous posts.