Front Porch: Foundation Plantings or Steps?

Easy knowing they use their front porch, below.  Mosquito repellent sitting at the French doors on the right.

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Their front yard is large & they have children.

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Foundation plantings here are an interesting choice.

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Of course, they have a fabulous large back yard too.

Privacy isn't needed otherwise the foundation plantings would be a bit taller.

Would you, if this were your home, keep the foundation plantings or move them & replace with steps?
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Plant selection is perfecto.  Large house & garden, 2 careers, children, dogs, and a yard easy to maintain.
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Always ask questions.  Makes you an instant garden designer.
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If this were a town home front porch it's amazing how a bit of height on the foundation plantings provide a sitting area with privacy.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pics at a soiree last weekend.  This house is close-in Atlanta.  A pocket of woodland in the city.    
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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.

Floral Arranging: Soiree in the Barn

Pair of flower arrangements look 'as if' they've just been gathered from the acres of meadow just outside the barn.

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Hardly.

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I look at My French Country Home for many reasons, mainly, oddly, the floral arrangements.  Sharon Santoni, author of MFCH, is one of the best.  Me do floral arrangement?  Garden design talent only.
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Christine Shockely, artist & floral designer, arranged the garden bouquets for the soiree in the barn last night.
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Christine, above.
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Flowers & greenery from the garden are imperative for the interior of your home.  Vanishing threshold.
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With this client, in addition to the garden gaining new layers, I've had the good fortune to evolve into a posse with her and 2 other compadres.   Yes, we do have an agenda.  And delight in fulfilling it.
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Past a certain age there are important things to do on this Earth.  Regardless of what others may think. We do those things.
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If you're curious about what we do, you aren't old enough yet to know.  If you do know you're a compadre too.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics taken last night at a client soiree.
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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: Built In Seating Rarely a Good Idea

Harvest Table for 12, arbor, pendant lights, vines & hedges.  Done.

Copy, it's the 1st rule of Garden Design.
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Fact, if a garden design was beautiful centuries ago.  It WILL be beautiful in your garden.
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Al fresco dining.  Across continents, cultures, eras, humans are hardwired for Al Fresco dining.
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Yesterday's Garden Design I completed includes 3 square teak tables.  They can be used individually or together as a harvest table.
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Fixed seating, as some decks have, remind me of George S. Patton speaking of war, "Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man."
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Give yourself choices.
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Another good one from Georgie,  "If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you'll be amazed at the results."                    .
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pic lost provenance.
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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.

Transitioning Style: Garden Rooms Different than Interior Rooms

Beyond the house, in their garden, is the rose garden with cottage.

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Formal.

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Quite obvious what type of garden room is next.

Rustic, and wild, below.

Truly, one of the best waterfalls, any continent, residential/commercial, I've ever seen.
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Garden rooms are easy to style.  They contrast formal to rustic and back again.  For many centuries now.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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Pics taken last week in the Paul/Lisa Brown 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.

Elements of a Garden: What do you see?

Formal with informal.

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Designed garden with controlled woodland.

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Garden rooms flow in contrast to each other.

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Color theme, green-brown-white.

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High density & low density for maximum pollinator habitat.

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Every garden room needs at least 1 cone shape.

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Cone shapes draw eyes to the sky.

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Cone shapes are hard to design, easy to do too many.

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Pair of cone shapes at an entry way expand the invitation.

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Contrasting shades of green,

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Contrasting sizes of foliage.

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Designed for structure 12 months of the year.
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Clipped hedging.
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Axis.  Double axis.
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Paths easy to walk.
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Fencing & gates chosen to flow with the house.  How do I know?  I just do.
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Stone in the paths matches stone elsewhere in the garden and on the home.  How do I know?  I just do.
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What did you see when you looked at this pic?
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Lost provenance on the pic.
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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 is in 2 Directions: Double Axis

Walking further into the back garden from the house, below, 

At the back of the garden, below, waking toward the house.

Same focal point, double axis.
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Gardens MUST be gorgeous in both directions.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics taken last week in the garden of Paul/Lisa Brown.  It will be on the Atlanta Botanical Garden Connoisseurs tour Mother's Day weekend, May 10-11, 2014.
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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: 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.

                                                                                 .

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.

                                                                                 .

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.

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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: 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.

.

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

.

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.