Design: How to Decorate a Big Blank Wall

Copy, is a rule of Garden Design I did not agree with for years.

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Now?  How could I have been so ridiculous?

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Facts.  If it's pretty in another garden it will be pretty in yours AND unique.

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That crazy 'terminally unique' illness.  We all have it & life is blessed once that disease is eradicated.

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A lot of houses have the grand blank wall, somewhere.

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Place 3 pair of closed door shutters, with mirrored transoms, add door knobs, hang lanterns, plant a vine, put in a few tons of #89 granite gravel, add furnishings.

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Done.

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Unique.

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Would love this at a flower show.  5 entries, each given the same size wall, copy the inspiration, above.

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Would love to see this in Italian rustic, French provincial, desert southwest.

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Whatever !

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Easy.

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COPY

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pic taken yesterday in a local garden.

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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.

Bunny Williams Potager: Complex, Pretty & Easy Life Support

Have seen potagers, below, for decades.  Across Europe & USA.  

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Potager: flowers, vegetables, herbs, clipped edging.

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Recent epiphany about what a potager is.

Mixing flowers & herbs with vegetables increases yields up to 80%.  How?  Increasing pollinator habitat.

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Clipped hedging keeps chickens out.  Chickens destroy vegetables/herbs/flowers, but eat harmful bugs. 

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Plus, you get chicken shit.

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Instead of a merely sweet, pretty, easy, garden design style, the potager was

a life support system throughout much of history.  Terrible history, with subsistence living, wars, plagues, no anti-biotics.
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How did anyone, aka me, not know this about a potager?  My grandmother knew these things.  My mother falls within the scope of Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique.  The generation of women leaving farms/agrarian knowledge behind to live a modern life raising children, tending house with a maid's help, and no work outside the home.  Oh, the drudgery of it all and yes I'm one of those grown children crying throughout, The Help, every time I watch it.
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" Friedan says that this change in education arrested girls in their emotional development at a young age, because they never had to face the painful identity crisis and subsequent maturation that comes from dealing with many adult challenges.^[9]"
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Sinful forgetting, a client named this loss of agrarian knowledge.
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Recently, because I now have chickens, mom has told stories about Grandma's chickens.  Grandma was an RN & head nurse at her hospital in Augusta, GA.  throughout those years she kept chickens and incubated many.  Mom was an only child and said how she hated the time her mother spent with the chickens.  From the stories I know Grandma raised significantly more chickens than her family needed or could feed easily with food scraps.  Why?  Grandma was giving away eggs and laying hens to every woman she met who needed a helping hand.   
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pic Bunny Williams
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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.

Design: Intentions more Powerful than Money

Where you put your attentions you will create your life.

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Yesterday, below, in my bower.

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With no money in a blue-collar working class neighborhood squarely within the prototypical demographics of today's suburbia near a major USA city.

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AKA my starter home, 3 decades later, with the alcoholic spouse during those decades gone.

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Where I put my attentions I created my life.

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Beautiful garden, beautiful life.  A thought, now my truth.

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Gratitude for that long marriage.  Forced into creating a life that was dream, until the plodding-plodding-plodding made it real.

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No regrets about any of my choices. 

Flowers falling on flowers yesterday, below.  Foetid & exhilarating.

My brain is repulsed by the foetidness of these composting flowers, yet the DNA thrives on its highest plain in the foetidness of my garden.  Life itself.
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Bower- Mirriam-Webster:     1:  an attractive dwelling or retreat

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:  a lady's private apartment in a medieval hall or castle

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:  a shelter (as in a garden) made with tree boughs or vines twined together

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Odd, but the foetidness of yesterday's flowers made me want to take off my clothes and roll-baby-roll !  Laughing & shouting of course.

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Now, tell me about street/prescription happy drugs?  Poor unfortunate souls needing those.  

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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.

Paint Walls & Furniture same Color

Paint all your furniture the color of the walls. 

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 A lovely comment from previous blog post.

A Ralph Lauren version, above.
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Recently renovated my master closet and all the furniture was painted the color of the walls.  Not large, it needed the cohesion.  Calm.  Clothes are the focus, getting dressed more easily.  Bill Blass, "If a woman has a closet full of clothes but nothing to wear, she doesn't know herself very well."
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Every garden needs a color trinity.  Green-brown-white is the classic for impact, calm & etc.
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Adore Ralph's color duo above.  Blue/white classic for centuries, and here, the people/lunch/conversation are the focal point.  After the main focal point of the views.
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Studying for 3 decades across continents/countries of centuries old gardens it's obvious, the best views require a garden with the most simplicity.
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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.

                                                                                 .

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.

Penelope Bianchi: Quote

Studying historic gardens across France I learned about field-gathered furniture.

Need patio/terrace furniture?  And the budget is tite?  Dumpster diving on garbage pic-up days, garage sales, thrift stores, junk shops.
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Paint it all the same color.
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Done.
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Queen of interiors & gardens, Penelope Bianchi says, "I am a huge believer in what "looks great" IS GREAT!"
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pic from Penelope Bianchi.  
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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.

                                                                                 .

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.

Design: Copy the Templates

Design isn't all magic, it's science too.

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Choose 30 front yards or 30 living rooms.

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Each will have a thread & template.

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Copy the threads & templates.

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I always ask clients for pictures of gardens they like, and must see their interiors.

At Yellow Belle, my satellite office/guest cottage the budget is zero to thrift store, or inherited.

Ironically, I've been forced to Yellow Belle with internet issues at my main office.

Living room template with a table behind the sofa + pair of lamps, has been oddly productive.  Laptop slid in without having to move anything.  Boom, working.

The dozens of pics I've saved for living rooms have a high number of screens amongst them.
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Never considered wanting or buying a screen, but there they are in myriad pics.
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Trusting the process, copying templates, this screen, above, was at my nearest thrift store.
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When I design gardens the humor never fails when a client says, "Oh, I like that .........."  Of course they do, it's in their pics.  I knew to copy their template.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics at Yellow Belle this week.  If you noticed the lamps, then I must tell you dozens were brought to my thrift store.  Ritz-Carlton Atlanta was remodeling and a contractor threw them on the street as garbage at his home.  His neighbor brought them in.  I bought 4.
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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.

                                                                                 .

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.

Design Style: Arcadian Idyll

Hanging in her hallway, below.  

Her artwork is varied with a strong thread of serenity amongst every piece.
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In her painting I see clearly the design style for a tiny lake with island on their property.
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Arcadian Idyll.
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Thomas Cole's, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1834, above.
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A pastoral rustic poem of utopian life.  Harmony with Nature.
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Does her beloved quite understand where she's heading?  No, but he's trusting her thru the process, to results.
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My beloved puts pin to balloon, announcing more than once, 'you can't live in a perfect little garden world'.  Knowing the words have no value to my reality.  Centuries worth of other people too.
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Amazing how visceral, attraction or repulsion, a rustic garden affects people.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Top pic taken at jobsite last week.
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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.

                                                                                 .

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.

Design: Making Clients Cry

After a soiree we discuss how guests have experienced her garden of acreage from arrival/departure.

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How the sexes, ages, income levels interact with the garden.

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Some cross the threshold of the garden, others look say a few words, some say/see nothing. 

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What branch of psychology is this?

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Me?  I must know how people experience my gardens, not just how my clients perceive their garden.

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Stay with me, it's going somewhere. 

Tears.  What makes someone cry in a garden?  Unbidden.  How does a garden guest arrive with their cocoon-of-life yet leave knowing their decades long construct is rendered too little?  In fact, gone.
  

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I've had crying guests in my garden for decades.  At my garden lectures across the country, crying attendees, for decades, too.

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Have been in my friend Susanne Hudson's garden when someone burst into tears.

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Stories follow all the tears.  Words, incoherent, powerful.  And understood.

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So.  At the garden, above, we were talking about her last soiree.  A guest, a man, financially successful, no longer young, in tears.  

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He awakened to how a garden is woven into DNA, and home.  One of the few who could verbalize, during epiphany, 'I will have this.'
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics taken at jobsite last week.
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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.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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

.

Construction by Award Winning:

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

Vintage: Keeping a 1945 Landscape

  Yellow Belle, ca. 1945, 1 acre wooded/open, potting shed, carriage house.

Garden paths are homemade concrete with risers of miscellaneous concrete block & stone, aluminum awnings ca. 40's too.
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Can't get enough of this view, living/breathing/growing/watershed/pollinator habitat/fragrant history.
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The human condition hunts for unconditional love.  Oddly, at this point in the galaxy, I feel wrapped/bathed/infused with that unconditional love.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic taken yesterday at Yellow Belle, my satellite office/guest cottage.
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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.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning:

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

Lunch: Spring Potager mix of Greens

Lunch preparations, below, at a jobsite yesterday.

Lettuces, violets, arugula, lemon balm, mint, 4 types of heirloom radishes, chives & vinaigrette.  Sour dough French batard bread with balsamic vinegar for dipping, cheese, finished off with tiny fresh mint infused sugar cookies.
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If I could bottle the fragrance of this fresh cut spring salad every bottle would sell.  More, the salad must be made into a sorbet.  A piquantly oddly fabulously perfect idea.
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Deeper, what did spring salads of centuries ago taste like with soil enriched from livestock not chemicals?  Her soil is 5 years organic, from when she bought her century old farm.

Chinese snowballs passing peak, top & above.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pics at jobsite yesterday.  We are finalizing the siting of a timber frame barn.
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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.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning:

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

Words: Use with Caution in Styling

With some people, years ago, I learned not to share joyous news.  They took delight in diminishing my joy.  Another epiphany, not too long after, 'I choose the plants in my garden, choose the people in my life.'  Within seconds eject button pushed on several persons.

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Lightening life's load was instant.  No regrets decades later.  

Words in the garden, be wary of using them.  Words, most often, dominate any mood, any narrative, weather, ephemeral delicate beauties, etc.
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Gardens speak, without words.  It is the human cheapening their language.
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Instead of admonishing with a picture proving my 'words' I've chosen an exception.  Words in a garden providing pleasure.  If my garden needs a sign, 'Spring has Sprung', do not ever, in a lifetime galaxy of black holes, hire me.  My garden decadently overflows spring's bounty.  Front door, above, is not my home/garden, it belongs to a young woman.  Her mom renovated/styled the home, to perfection.  'Words', included !
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Love exceptions, and breaking rules.
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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.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning:

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

Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival: Downsizing Conservatory to Chicken Coop Bike

Conservatory, below, I created for the Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival with Susanne Hudson.

Susanne called last week about creating another garden together, "No."  Rains every week since mid-December have decimated my schedule.
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I'll be contributing a bicycle doodied-up as something drug from the Chicken Coop and the witch will be riding !  (Silence, well aware when one must doody-up anything, especially past a certain age, the robot is repeating, 'Danger Will Robinson.) 
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The distance from 'no' to the Chicken Coop Witch's Bike was under a minute.  Insanity.
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Anyway, the plan is to put the bike in my Chicken Coop when it's all over.  
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Susanne's garden will be on the tour.  MUST SEE.
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Penny McHenry Hydrangea Festival, 7th annual, Friday - Sunday, June 6th - 8th, 2014, in Douglas County, Georgia.
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This year's theme is, The Wizard of Oz.  There will be wheelbarrow gardens, scarecrows, vegetable gardens, tour gardens, vendor booths, judged flower show & more. 
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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.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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

.

Construction by Award Winning:

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