How will you get from point A to point B ?
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Flow.
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Flow is at the front end of my Garden Design Equation.
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When I was in college,
SMU, someone mentioned the sidewalks in front of
Dallas Hall were poured, AFTER, they saw where students tread dirt paths thru low meadow.
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(Privately, off topic, in person, you may wish to ask me about the tunnels under those sidewalks. That was a crazy fun date.)
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Architecture, interior design, color, materials, scale, below, are sublime. In addition, flow is the unseen subliminal element. So good it's taken for granted.
At our ca. 1900 American Farmhouse architecture home, below. We haven't lived here a week, how can we possibly know where to put paths, parking courts, drives, terraces, pole barn, and links throughout all?
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Overflow parking, below, from my office view. My little van, Tess, is in front of the house, and another truck with long open bed trailer are in the drive along the opposite side of the house.
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The golf cart has yet to be brought from the house we sold, nor 2 tractors and 2 more work trucks.
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None of the above traffic/parking issues includes guest vehicles.
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I adore this.
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Creating flow/parking in our own garden.
Foot traffic, below. Tractor Supply had a single boot choice for my new home, below. Work shoes from my former cottage garden, not sufficient in the least.
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Drive, front parking court, overflow parking, a path, hugging the house are speaking. Good news.
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Further from the house, the flow has no voice.
At the back of the house, 2 out buildings, at left & at right, must be moved, due to flow.
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Building at left is impeding vehicles, and building at right is blocking the deck we're building around the back of the house.
Both buildings a century old, clad in metal more recently. We'll reuse the wood in our new shed I want built in the orchard, to be planted.
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Hope you sense the best element in creating flow. Anticipation.
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Every layer of a garden is exciting. Never tiresome.
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More than anything I want several dump trucks arriving with our gravel. Too soon, don't know exactly where to place it. Patience. This is where G*d taught me patience, in a garden. We all get life lessons, yet they arrive in their own time and have different teachers. If we don't 'get' the bigger life lessons, they keep arriving until we do.
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Patience. Your impatience is why I have a career. Every client, just like I was at the front end of gardening, thinking they can put in a garden, do, and it's horrendous. After my first garden making, vile of course, it was off to years of Extension Service courses, symposiums, then another college degree, in horticulture, finally touring historic gardens across Europe for 2+ decades. Now, I know a few things about gardening, and thrill at the new lessons still arriving, every day.
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Moving into this new home/garden it is clear, I am an experienced gardener but a new farmer. Adoring a new learning curve. And living Thomas Jefferson's, "
but tho' an old man, I am but a young gardener. ", backwards. G*d has a sense of humor in this new lesson, which feels like a gift, not a lesson. Great segue into Joseph Campbell's, "
When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be."
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Top pic,
Wendy Posard, bottom pics taken yesterday in our new home/garden.