Landscape Ethics: What Are Yours? Where Do You Apply Them?

 With your garden, has a choice been made?  Your approach, is it: physical, joyful, literary, moral, and ethical?  Had you already put all of this to words?  From tricycle days, I knew without words, primal abiding is outside. 

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Landscape ethics, what are yours?  Can you list 3, now, in the order of importance to you?  Are you living your landscape ethics in the fullness of your heart? Which layers elude you?  What can you change to get there?  For you.

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No one gets their beautiful garden without redemption.  In the beginning, you go into your garden to change it.  Visions of a paradise.  With good fortune, a few years pass, many unforeseen changes made, and, finally beauty, paradise formed.  Along the way, you realize, the garden changed you.   

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'Your paradise is a quality of life; but, deeper than that, it's your life.'  P. O'Tuama

  

Pic, above, here. 

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Tell me again, above, how important foundation plantings are.  What is the safety clinging to them?  Will foundation plantings get you paradise? 

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"Paradise", comes into Latin & Greek & English, through an early Iranian language, Avestan, which is the language of the scriptures, of Zoroastrian, and, it means, "an enclosed garden."  P. O'Tuama. 

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Pic, above, here. 

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" This poem isn't sentimental.  This poem is saying, here is what it's like to hold  paradise, when you know you live in a reality that people would want to steal your paradise, steal your life."  P. O'Tuama

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'Steal your life', for too many, is literal, and for too many, metaphor.  

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"...and sometimes a poet, if they want to make a serious point about politics, will enter into that serious point thru a side door, and they might describe something of landscape or something of memory or something of joy, but there's a line in it that strikes home, because that line is telling a deep political truth around which everything else gathers."  P. O'Tuama.

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Pic, above, here.

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At the front end, planning/planting your landscape is thrilling.  You are in charge.  You have the control.

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 "To know what is coming is to perceive control; and the mind is all about control, particularly in the cerebral, capitalist, goal-oriented global north.  We want to control, or, in neuroscientific terms, we want to exercise cognitive control, our mysterious ability to behave in accord with the goals we set.  ....for, ultimately, humans want to control the future, or to believe that they can."  Anna Badkhen

  

Pic, above, here.

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Walls of trees, walls of hedges, stone hallway to the door, above, Tara Turf lawn, art against the wall (properly plinthed), completing the room.  Simplicity.  Yet not.  Pollinator habitat, fruiting orchard, a room with layers of ethics and meaning.  Something else about these types of landscapes, above.  They're the most likely to survive for centuries.  

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Tara Test Questions: What are the layers of ethics?  What are the layers of meaning?  How is this orchard generating maximum production?  At its most basic level, Landscape Ethics spill upward throughout our lives.  We're gifted the joyful beginning, more, grace.

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Pic, above, here.

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Your life, above/below, is the focal point of your Landscape Ethics.  From the fungi in the soil, lizard on the wall, blossoms, bees, birds, your home and how it's situated in your garden, how you see your garden while sitting inside your home.

  

Pic, above, here.

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Did a double take at this garden, above.  Created same Landscape for a client.  She'll be sending me a note after seeing the pic.  Proud to have created a landscape to survive centuries.  Yet, no worries if it's paved over in 20 years for a road.  I've done my duty.  

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"A lot of problems happen because of your internal state.  When you're calm, happy, and fulfilled you don't pick fights, create drama, or keep score."  S. Parrish.

  

Pic, above, here.

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Since those tricycle days, pure joy taking hold of Landscape Ethics.  Didn't know at the outset the Landscape was putting Ethics into me.  Nor how many years the process.  The ride has given a primal challenge, primal effort, primal abiding, and a primal redemption.

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A lot, yes.  Yet not the biggest Landscape Ethics gift discovered.  Do you know?

 

  

Pic, above, here.

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From the start, while I was fiddling with control, my garden had already set its mission.

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Do you know?  Took a few decades for me.

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Love.  In the garden, it is this simple.  Whether you think so or not. 

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Abiding love.  The type of love given to all.  Agape love.     

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This precious child, above, knows.

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"...an older writer friend tells me that the role of a writer in America today is to help the readers be less affraid." A. Badkhen.  In the garden I can better articulate my sorrow or fear,  and it's diminished.

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"The sages interpret the fable thusly: to truly pray we must first achieve a state of exultation, which means that joy, not sorrow, brings man closer to God.  Poets help us make our prayers heard." A. Badkhen.

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In the garden, is your poetry.  Your prayers.  Joy.  Love.

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Garden & Be Well,  XO T

Anna Wintour has Tara Turf?

Age 8, saw my 1st garden like this, below, in Augusta, GA.  The adults were content to stay inside & chat.  I did the rude child thing, and begged to go outside.  They were glad to get rid of me.  Had to be, I was more than glad to be gone from them.  Not until I saw the movie, Beetlejuice, did anything describe how I felt, going outside that house, that day, into the garden.  Another world.
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The garden was entirely green, wild, mischievously wild.  Looking ahead, left, right, the garden was telling me to go everywhere, all a fabulous mystery, yet speaking to me in a language I knew.  And, that feeling of being alone, in this adventure, perhaps explains more fully, in adulthood, studying historic landscapes across Europe for decades.  And creating the garden for myself.
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Few ask for. or understand, this type garden, up front, in USA.  I design as much of them into the ubiquitous requests, as I can.  A tiny handful, across 3 decades, have asked for the full monty.
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I was caught by this garden, below, being presumptuous.  It's owner, in the public eye for decades with an international successful career, and public persona so Cruella Deville, Meryl Streep played her in a movie.  The garden, below, takes her mask off.  Anna Wintour's garden, below.    












Pics, above, here.
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Full article from NYTimes, here.
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Garden & Be Well,   XOT

Walled Orchard

With an engineering degree backing my horticulture degree there is always an element of wishing I had been there at construction while studying historic gardens across Europe for decades.
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About 4 years ago a client said she wanted a walled orchard.
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Oddly, I knew where it should go, how it should look, how big it should be, how many gates it should have, and what each gate should look like.
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The Orchard is coming into its own this year, and will be ready for showtime pics next year.  I've taken pics starting with virgin pasture.
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Sideways learning.  Knowing, with confidence, how to design the orchard.  Century old bricks, each gate custom.  Yes, the expense matches its wonder.  Building a pool or walled orchard, without confidence, I would have to step away.  Too much money on the line, for mistakes.  More, it's building someone's dream, one they will have to live with.  No margin for error.
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Pic, above, here.
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       "He started to worry though that he would get stuck in a job doing something he didn't believe in, so he quit and moved to Spain with his wife and he started to write poetry."            .

I come across sentences, above, humbly pausing.  Deciding to pin the safety of life's earnings upon a garden design career, with huge blow back & fear mongering from family.  Even years of pitiful earnings, never swayed my choice.  After 2008's debacle to the economy, and my career trajectory stronger/better, all the previous years mount into decades, it's obvious, best choice ever.
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Joseph Campbell is right, Follow your bliss.  When you get into the pure groove, all types of unseen hands, the universe itself, partakes in your bliss, along the way you get private acknowledgements that you're indeed in your groove, someone asks you to design/build an old orchard, oddly you know exactly what to do, and already have the experienced talented team to execute.
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Garden & Be Well,   XOT
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There was a question about the orchard, one of the corners too close to the gravel lane.  One of my favorite aspects, the lane evolved around the orchard, not the reverse.    Corner & lane built as designed.