Shoes: Stupid or Fabulous ?

 Remember when maternity clothes were covered in teddy bears, elephants & other stupidities?  Baby bags too?  I know, showing my age with these observations.  Gardening wear is stuck in that era of having a walnut for a brain.

Why are there no gardening shoes with these, above, as inspiration?
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Rubbers with flowers?  Ladybugs, grasshopers?  Gardening ensembles from hat to shoes are suitable for Aunt Clara.  Why not choose Samantha !!!!
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Garden & Be Well,            XO Tara
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Pic via Habitually Chic.

Simplicity Isn't For Sale

Lawn to the house.

 A simplicity best for many gardens.

Same view, above, opposite axis.
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Why this Landscape Design simplicity isn't seen more, especially in USA?
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 Many times thru the decades I've been hired as the 2nd or 3rd Landscape Designer.    Why?  The previous 'landscape design' work was pure SALES.
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Simplicity isn't for sale.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pics via Greige Design.  Client last week told me, when I was done, she knew something was wrong with the previous plan she paid for.  When she saw my plan she was able to finally verbalize what was 'wrong'.  Plants were stuffed everywhere.  Every profession has their underbelly of disgust.

Practically Perfect

This would never happen 'new' in Atlanta, GA.  

And isn't that sad.
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Why does everything have to be so perfect?  Mary Poppins knew 'practically perfect' was better.
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This feels like a one sided conversation with Jane Austen.  Of course we know what type of character she would let live here!
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic via Pigtown Design.  Can't you smell the Tara Turf?

Stone Wall Needs to be Seen

A well maintained century, below, at this home.

 Stone accent wall near the entry, above, is obscured by a gorgeous Japanese maple, below.

Have asked the pruner to create tiny views thru the Japanese maple  to the stone wall.  Yet keep the Japanese maple gorgeous too.
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Garden & Be Well,          X O Tara
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Same house as previous post.  Pics taken with my phone & you see my little work basket.  It holds pencils, circle templates, erasers, keys, phone.....and shouldn't be in the pic.

How To Make These Windows More Fabulous

At her bluestone terrace, below.  Inside is the kitchen.

Soon, French doors will open onto the bluestone terrace.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic taken yesterday at a jobsite.  Notice the gap in the ferns?  Saw the culprit eating them.  Her dog!  Unrepentant.
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When I told her the windows HAD to be French doors she smiled and said it was validation.  Her thoughts exactly.

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

What Is A Status Symbol?

Can you spot the status symbol?

In the land of freeways, subdivisions, strip malls, too many people?

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A meadow is status symbol.  A gravel/dirt drive with wildflowers & trees is status symbol.

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This is a CHOICE, above.  It is Landscape Design.  

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It's not a 'less than' drive because they couldn't afford to pave.  It's the intellect of knowing what's important in life.

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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara

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Pic via Habitually Chic. 

How To Create A Timeless Landscape

Landscape Design question, "Can you take black/white pics of your garden & it's TIMELESS ?

Was this pic taken 2012 or 1972 or.......?  And WHERE?  USA, Brazil, Italy........

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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara

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Pic via Habitually Chic.  Can you imagine having those beautiful dogs !!!  And driving on that gravel.....

Lunch: Meandering & Productive

We've been having lunch for decades.  Yesterday's was planned for weeks.  Of course I had an unexpected jobsite visit in the time slot allotted for preparation.

 He appeared, with a bottle of wine, walking thru the back garden.

 And an appreciation for my new girls & what they're providing, below.

 Made egg salad sandwiches.  The heirloom girls are producing 6/day, they hatched the 1st week of April.

Instead of Greek yogurt with fresh fruit & local honey you see what time allowed, above.
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He can retire & I'm pushing him not to.  His house has new rooms available, children out of college.  We met when they were toddlers.  Peers in the Garden industry we spoke a lot of community activism.  Bringing a Garden perspective to groups without a hint of Garden in their soul.  We're already doing it and leverage ideas for more.
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Luxurious,  meandering conversation about work at the pace of lunch.  A deeper vein of gleaning.  Productive.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Of course we ate in the conservatory.  No time for pics there or the garden, it's fall fabulous at the moment, we both had appointments.  

Vanishing Threshold with Color Theme

Modern addition with classic architecture, as if THAT is often successful.  More deeply sublime are the accouterments.  Garden focal points placed on perfect axis with interior doors, secondary focal points placed on angled axis.  A perfect square with the planters & a circle in stone.  

Layers of green, lean-green-serene.  Statuary & planters color themed to echo house.
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It's obvious this is a tight collaboration between owner & landscape designer.
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Vanishing threshold is magnificent here.
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Garden & Be Well,         XO Tara
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pic via Pinterest.  Which part of your vanishing threshold is 'magnificent'?

Leggy Hags

Leggy Hags!  And this latest pruning is wrong too.  Want lush foliage top to bottom?  Prune the top of your bushes slightly narrower than the bottom.  It's that easy.

This gate is perfection.  

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Garden & Be Well,        XO Tara

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Thank you Cousin Cathy for sending your vacation pics from Nantucket...

Suzanne Somers' Recipes & Landscapes

Suzanne Somers' donated a great deal of money, years ago, to a medical wing in honor of those with family/friends of addicts.  It added dimension to what I knew of her.

 Then, her home went for sale with pics of her landscaping, all the pics here.

She writes books, does product & weight loss sales, acts, lectures, & promotes-promotes-promotes.

Ironically, she doesn't promote her gardening skills.  They are prodigious.
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Between appointments yesterday was my favorite junking haunt.  Suzanne Somers', Eat Great, Lose Weight,  $3.  I knew if I liked her gardens I would like her taste palette.  I was right.  Have already tabbed several recipes in her book.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Of course I bought more.  Copper sauce pan/lid $18 & a copper soup pot/lid $16.  Both almost new with their linings in great shape.  

Patio Table Not To Use

Mostly, I design square & rectangular patio/deck/terrace tables.  Easily placed next to a wall, rails or the edge of your concrete/stone/gravel/wood.

A pair of matching square/rectangular tables is most flexible.  Use separately or pushed together.

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This patio seems to have neighbors looking in?  I would use shutters or custom lattice for more privacy.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pic House of Turquoise.  Ironically, I was in a garden yesterday needing a Round table.  I love knowing what the exceptions are!  Can you imagine how much space a round table would waste on this patio, above?

John Rosselli Garden Room

Two years junking & thrifting and most everything, below, should be found in-some-variation.

John Rosselli's magic.  Pretty, charming, welcoming, color, light & etc.
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This is the perfect room to come in from the garden with dirty shoes, tools, leaves in my hair & a few bugs falling off my clothes.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pic via Veranda on John Rosselli Antiques.  The more I scratch the surface of John Rosselli I know why Bunny Williams married him.  Did you see Garden & Gun was hosted by Bunny at Treillage?

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.

Princess Sturdza & Making Shade

Princess Sturdza's home, Le Vasterival, and garden in France were a hilarious welcome.  She was waiting for us standing on a tree stump holding a long sharp stick.  Describing the treasures awaiting we were also told 'never' to set foot in one of her beds.  Within the hour a silly German man leaned forward to ask her a question.  As quickly as his evil-offending-foot tapped her bed she whacked it with the stick.  Hard.

 We arrived, above, I still see her & hear the crunch of gravel.
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Last nite was my SHADE lecture.  Instead of the ubiquitous pics & ridiculous focus on shade plants blah-blah-ad nauseum bore.  I focused on making shade where desired, and the pruning away of shade where it's too thick.  

Like the Princess my home leads with a bay window, above.  

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It's tiny, faces full sun, a street & several neighbors.  A trinity of unpleasantness easily landscape designed into a charming Bay Terrace garden with gravel, shade, focal point, seating & privacy from the neighborhood view.    

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Who's the Princess?

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Garden & Be Well,       XO Tara

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Top pic from internet, my Le Vasterival pics are still slides.  Bottom pic my bay window yesterday.  A great place to read, use wireless, lunch/dinner, journal, enjoy the birds-blooms-filtered lite.

Front Door Ideas

Puppet Barbuda's wicked eye.  

Boxwood disgracefully pruned into helmet hair, and wider at the top creating leggy hags with pockets of space at the bottom.
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Coiled hose lingering for pride of place.
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Blocks of wood anchoring exterior lights? Oh dear, at least stain them the color of the siding.

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The delight of the sweet round doormat.   A great touch.

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Charming vernacular baskets over the front door.

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Adore the shutters open in welcome.

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Why mulch when a groundcover is less maintenance & more lush?

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Elegantly shabby seeing money stretched.  The steps/rails are solidly good and tell a story.  Windows are at a crossroads of rotting but surviving with storm windows attached. 

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The window box & front door paint color tell Puppet Barbuda she wants inside this sweet cottage.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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A Cousin Cathy pic from Nantucket this summer.  This cottage reminds me of Aunt Tillie in her 80's, widowed & easily taking care of her brick cottage & garden.  Plenty of money but not one red cent to replace the furnace.  Smiling with a glint in her eye, "Let the next owner pay for it!"  Blessedly several of her antiques are now in my home & garden.  

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Who is Puppet Barbuda?  Landscape Design Critic of course.  

Brooke Astor Library

French doors into the garden and you must slip between the chair & table to get there.

Sweet, sitting at the desk with a French door open on an early summer day, birds chirping.  I see the lamp on as I come in from the garden at the gloaming.  Of course turn the yellow chair slightly for a better view of the garden while still seeing across the library.  Book in hand, cat in lap.
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This room had me at hello.
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pic via Habitually Chic.  It's Brooke Astor's library at Holly Hill.  Saw it somewhere else & it 'stuck' then in the memory bank.  A fabulous garden is IMPLIED with this room.  Miss the days of seeing her mentioned in the lifestyle section of NYT.

Built To Prosper

 

"In Pennsylvania we find the first pre-conceived garden schemes, William Penn directed the commissioners who settled the colony in 1682 to see that every house "be placed if the Person pleases, in ye middle of its place as to the breadth way of it, so that there may be grounds on each side, for Gardens, or Orchards, or fields, yt it may be a greene Country towne, wch will never be burnt and will allways be wholesome."  Richardson Wright

 

 

How many decades now have our homes been laid out for the convenience of getting into a car and traveling to the nearest strip mall?  Developments approved for their tax base (and the developers pocket)  not what the roads, schools, water, sewage, police, etc can handle.
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Garden & Be Well,        XO Tara
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Pic le Jardin Blanc.  Built by a doctor at the end of the Civil War in Douglasville, GA   

Gravel To The Foundation

 

What is the incessant USA love affair with foundation plantings about? 

Bushes are either leggy hags or green meatballs.
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Ugly, requires maintenance, depreciates the value of a home.
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Garden & Be Well,         XO Tara
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Adore the gravel solution, above.  Pic from Deborah Silver who owns Detroit Garden Works.
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I left USA for Europe to study gardens once horticulture degree was firmly in hand.  Was taught how to be a guy with a truck mow-blow-go.  Worse, they taught  how to landscape design from the street looking at the house.  Europe was a grand teacher.  Will never forget the first time I saw gravel to the house foundation.  GOT IT.  Love moments of epiphany.