The Best Outdoor Color Trinity: How to Own It !

One exterior color trinity has been used with undiluted success for thousands of years.
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Green - Brown - White
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Green - Brown - White creates an alchemy frothing with each incarnation.  Guaranteed.
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Pic, above, here.
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How to Own It ?
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Choose your Green - Brown - White from its palette already in your home.  Your dishes, furniture fabrics, cloth napkins, art on the wall, wallpaper choices, the clothes in your closet.
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Pic, above, here.
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It gets better.
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You get to choose a main subsidiary color.
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A color to POP.
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Pic, above, here.
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Choosing your Subsidiary Color, look specifically at the art on your walls, throughout the house.  Perhaps a wallpaper.
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Never have I not discovered a Subsidiary Color without it being an accent color, POPPING, from each piece of art.
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Pic, above, here.
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Subsidiary Colors are great for a Front Door.
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Remember, I must know who you are from the curb.
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Pic, above, here.
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It's been a joy through the years helping choose specific Green - Brown- White colors with clients, and great fun choosing the Subsidiary Color.
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When I share with clients their Subsidiary Color, they respond as if to a strong gale, wide eyes, leaned back onto their heals, no words, but plenty of sounds coming out.  Speechless.
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Why?
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Acknowledging THEIR color, probably for the first time.  PERMISSION & BENEDICTION.  Redemption.  Then, smiles, and laughing.
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A slip of color, threading throughout their home, suddenly 'Nothing to Everything'.
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The mask has fallen, their real self appears.  Their 'Extraordinary pretend selves....' would have never braved choosing that Subsidiary Color.  Yet there I stand, telling them what their Subsidiary Color is.  .
This color, their raw power, finally acknowledged.  That color, coming home, seeing it on the front door, or shutters, or garden furniture, bringing the smile to your face, and a feeling in your heart, only Home can bring.  Your Home.
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Pic, above, here.
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Oddly, this ochre, below, has been intuitively chosen by many clients, in their homes.  Poof, Subsidiary Color, outside.

Pic, above, here.
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Would love to choose a Subsidiary Color from this painting, below, if it were in a client's home.
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So much, "Scope for the imagination." Anne of Green Gables.
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Pic, above, here.
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Boom, boom and more boom, with Subsidiary Color, below, this room makes me want several homes, merely to use all the Subsidiary Color choices.
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Pic, above, here.
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Monet was particular about color in his garden, including what color he allowed his gardeners to wear.  Furlow Gatewood, below, is wearing that color, a chambray blue.  Get yourself to the Thrift Store this weekend and buy several properly colored gardening shirts.  You must walk your garden, acceptable to Monet.
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Take the link to Furlow Gatewood, order his book.  Do it.  Today.  (No, no affiliate link.....yet !)
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Pic, above, here.
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Fun Subsidiary Color, below, with Green - Brown - White.
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Pic, above, here.
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'Frida Kahlo's true dialogue was with herself, and the main witness was her art.'
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Tara Dillard's true dialogue is with herself, and the main witness is her Garden.
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Fun, in calm abiding, understanding your own dialogue, and who's partaking with you.  Clarity is there, if you choose to see.
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Why the Color Trinity?  It will "exude an aura of technical virtuosity." Roberta Smith, every time.  Including yours.  Own It.  Why Wait?  Translate your repertory beyond the mundane, go big.
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'Collude to visceral effect.' Roberta Smith.
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When you choose your outdoor Color Trinity, you're choosing "Lucid demarcations".  No worries if anyone understands, your garden does, I do.  So does Providence.
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Your garden must tell me who you are from the street, does it do that?
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Why is this so important?  It's your life.  How you choose to live your life.
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Begin with house & garden as one.  From the soil upward, choose the grace & joy of a systemic topography.
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In the morning drinking your coffee, looking out the windows, seeing your garden, its focal points, Color Trinity, Subsidiary Color, plantings, from across the expanse of the room you're in, and inside your home, its colors and art and textures and comforts; speaking to you and the garden, you're happy with who you are, your home, your garden.  Another day, a seemingly small victory.  But you know different.
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Finally, inside your home, the light of a new day, traveling across galaxies and eons to reach you, the wavelengths of light, turning to particles as they travel through your garden, back into waves going through your windows, onto you and in you, bathing in such a light, it's physically felt.  As Toddy said to Victoria, in Victor/Victoria, "..... a religious experience."
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No worries Green - Brown - White has been done for centuries, each time it performs a "..spontaneous aesthetic..."
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Weather should be good this weekend.  Will do a bit of gardening, and feeling, "Luncheon-on-the-grass-mode." Roberta Smith.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Well aware I've said everything, above, before.  Will continue, but you know that.

Same Garden Design: Different Each Time

"I don't like the idea of happiness --- it is too momentary --- I would say that I was always busy and interested in something --- interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness."  Georgia O'Keefe
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Garden Design technique, below, is the same in each garden.  Whether you adore Natural, Formal, Farm, Modern, Eclectic, Etc. each is accommodated. Centuries of Gardens proving its worth.
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An axis leading to a focal point, scaled to walking, seasons, budget, maintenance, and grace.


Pic, above, here.
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What day will you visit the garden, above/below, what day will you see it shot, above/below?


Pic, above, here.


Pic, above, here.
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Going to this garden, I would rather see it off season, above/below.  Far more to learn about how it is gardened & designed.  Pics are nice; physically being in the space better.
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Pic, above, here.
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Formal allee, above, and the same Garden Design technique, as a Wilderness, below.
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Pic, above, here.
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Another version of the same Garden Design, below.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Garden Design, below, is same Garden Design as, above, and above that....
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Pic, above, here.
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Across centuries, it works.  Here's the joy; your property, your home, your soil, your sun/shade, your heart.  Take joy.  It's grace for your life.  And Earth.

 
Pic, above, here.
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At the front end of my professional Garden Design career, this garden, below, was 'nice', now this garden thrills.  Layers of Nature.  Histories of peoples, continents, eras copying this same Garden Design, below.  Knowing 'the why' of how the Garden Design, below, works adds to its joys.  And, a template protecting Earth from human interference, anthropocene, we're living through.
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Using trees, shrubs, groundcovers for your zone, micro-climate, once established, you won't need irrigation, and certainly no fertilizers or chemicals ever.
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What's in the Garden Design, below, making it so special?  Canopy and understory trees, shrubs, meadow.  Nature's potent pollinator habitat.  Given to all.  Freely.
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Choosing mostly natives, or non-native non-invasives, this Garden Design, below, will live centuries.  Regenerative.  Picking non-natives can starve local flora/fauna.  A loving heads-up to the 'why' of using Natives.  Using Natives was passed to me, with love, and its how I choose to pass it to you.  Not one of us perfect.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Time passes, articles read from other scientific disciplines, removed from the world of Garden Design, about soil.  Years of articles about soil, biomes, fungi, pollution, trees, air, water, carbon, oil, industrialization.
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"Many of us have been wonderstruck at the discovery of mindedness within the Earth and between trees, sensitive, ephoratory, and communicative below our gardens,..... over 5 kilometers deep, 27,000 fathoms down, there exists a rich ecosystem, 2 times the size of all the world's oceans, teaming with micro organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of all humans....some organisms can live thousands of years.
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1 inch of topsoil equals a thousand years.
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If humility were imagined as a visible thing, it would be soil: quiet, brown, soft, maintaining networks underground and feeding the whole of the living world." Jay Griffiths, Dwelling on Earth.
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Trees communicate myriad bits of information with electricity through the soil.  Thousands of miles not unusual.
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Tesla came to fame, discovering electricity free from the soil.
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The same electricity in the soil, powers our heart & brain.
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“Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind.

"Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed -- incidentally, deliberately -- imagination and memory go with them. 

W.H. Auden knew this. 'A culture,' he wrote warningly in 1953, 'is no better than its woods.' ”

― Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Across the decades I've had many client homes, Atlanta, GA, bricked with Chicago Brick. seeing an article seemingly about them was too much to pass by, instead, learning about soil, ice ages, politics, racism.
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From that article,  To and From The Common Brick: Slow-Motion Disaster On Chicago's South Side,  

    "Between 1780-1980 USA lost 60 acres of wetlands every hour for the entire 200 year span."
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No stewardship in that sentence, pure politics.  Soil, animals, water, fungi, weather, plants, what else is affected in our loss of wetlands?  What does the loss of wetlands cause to happen to soils underneath what is lost, weather, temperatures.
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Husbandry is in tatters.  Rarely is 'husbandry' used, quaint, outdated as a word, and lifestyle choice.  From Webster's Third New International dictionary: " Husbandry 2a: the judicious use of resources: CONSERVATION, THRIFT (borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry --- Shakespeare.  b: the control or use of resources: MANAGEMENT (problems of soil conservation and husbandry of water resources --- "  Caps are Webster's.
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Pic, above, here.
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This Garden Design, above, is husbandry, if plants chosen are native, or neo-native and friendly to local flora/fauna/soil.  Also stewardship to Nature, yourself,  and property values.  Siting trees properly, you will save money on HVAC bills.
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Stewardship.  Gardening always gains by the newest members from the work world, retiring.  Teaching Master Gardeners for decades, students at the local college, and home owners classes at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, I get to meet pure gardening fiends, pent up from decades of professional life, now retired.  Hoping now for retiring lawyers.  People to help rewrite Home Owner Association rules, myriad layers, including landscaping.  Instead of mow-blow-go landscaping encouraging mono-culture lawns, irrigation, fertilizer, mulch, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, decades of mulch application, and etc.  A turn to Landscape Husbandry, Landscape Stewardship.
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Homeowner Associations, decades old, have a great purpose, over time keeping it great must include a review.  Changes, with the same mission statement, must include husbandry and stewardship.
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"We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom.  And separating one from the other...knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about."  Toni Morrison.
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I was late to the honor of stewardship.  It came with the birthday gift of 8 heirloom chickens, 8 years ago.  Five chickens massacred, the neighbor's dog, don't ask.  Three chickens remain, still teaching lessons.  My chickens notice Covid, their leftovers have been threadbare.
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"The epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out."  Walter Benjamin.
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"Wisdom in the age of information."  Maria Popova.
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Since 2018 when mom comfortably & slowly declined and died, the sense of life blowing apart and coming back together again continues to repeat.  When will that stop?  Was it always true?  Why did I just notice in 2018?
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Having information, about my own life, family, past to present, blew up into merely facts.  The information changed, not the facts.  Some facts obscured, received sunshine.
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Funny that.  My turn to learn this.
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Realized long ago, we all get the same lessons in life, but at different times with different teachers.
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Do I take the lessons?  What do I do with it, if I do?  That makes up our lives.
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Answers are in the garden, gardening, propagating, designing, precious, this beat, given me, a resource.  Things will continue to blow up, come back together, and in the garden, I'll make sense of it, or not, while taking joy in the gardening.  Learning something new.
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This template has been solid in the time of Covid.
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Garden & Be Well, XOT

The Zen of Formal

"...the ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms, not to mention the further and more fulfilling gift of getting started all over again --- never resting upon the oars of success or in the doldrums of disappointment....Getting started, keeping going, getting started again --- in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm..."
--- Seamus Heaney
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Most common phrase customers say when we meet, "Oh, I don't want anything formal."  Then proceed to describe what they want and show photos.  You know what's coming next.
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Every description, every photo of their dream garden, FORMAL.
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Pic, above, here.
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Classically formal dining room, above.  Graveled rectangle, focal point on axis, canopy/understory bushes/trees, walls, floor, flow, function, contrast, texture, seasons, sound. 
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Easily decorated for mid-century modern, or any style, zone, theme you desire.
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"Small change, small wonders --- these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life." --- Barbara Kingsolver
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Show me your outdoor dining room.  Better, invite your friends to a meal.  Not there yet?  Want to be?  There lies your small change, small wonders. 
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No budget for outdoor furnishings for a bit?   Pair of saw horses with planks, as Martha Washington served myriad guests in their garden at Mount Vernon.  Better, improvise, rescue 'saw horses', and 'planks'.  With this mission, your outdoor dining room will be unique, though the garden design technique has been in use long BCE. 
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What is an outdoor dining room to you, if you don't have one now?  "The opportunity to experience yourself differently..." --- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
 
Pic, above, here.
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"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.  So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible." --- William Faulkner
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Yes, you can do the impossible.  In the garden of your heart.  Sure it's impossible.  That's why it's there for you to do.  "We go on.  Because it is the hard thing to do.  And we owe ourselves the difficulty." --- Nikki Giovanni
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Touring a beautiful garden, with our British historic gardens expert and guide, after he had described a garden compost area feature we were standing in, a woman said, "That's inconvenient."  Quickly he responded, "Making love is work, but we do it."
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It is the difficulty of creating our garden, bringing its blessing.  Most often your 'difficulty' will be mental.  Seeing.  Seeing rightly, is the work.  And gift.
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Pic, above, here.
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"Clear your mind of 'can't." --- Samuel Johnson.
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Pic, above, here.
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Thrilling.  Beyond thrilling, above.  So little there, yet it's a garden.  Living in a ca. 1938 starter home or 1990 cluster home?  Garden Design, above, is for you too.
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Pic, above, here.
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Trees as total Garden Design, above.  You cannot go wrong choosing this path.  More, choose a tough native pollinator tree.  Choose to pollard, prune them to shape. 
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"And so we turn the page over/To think of starting.  This is all there is." --- John Ashbery
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Pic, above, here.
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How many times has this Garden Design been done across centuries.  This one leaves no gardener or garden or home behind.
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Works every time. 
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In a typical USA subdivision, this is a good Garden Design, above, to copy, and site a hedge of evergreens at the front of your lawn.  Tall enough to hide the road & cars, for sure, maybe tall enough to hide your first story.  Depends on your location, views, noise.
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Pic, above, here.
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The Well Placed Chair, above.  You know you've designed a good garden, when, in season, Nature takes over all your efforts.  Laughing at you.  And you like it. 
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Pic, above, here.
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Use pots that won't break, trees tolerating your zone, and drip irrigation, above.
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Adore how little is in the garden, above.  It's Tara Turf, green ball, hedge, canopy tree, house as backdrop, color theme, textures, flow.  Did you already see all those things, above, and name them to yourself?
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Pic, above, here.
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Hiding the pool.  Especially good, if you must put in a fence, yet have acreage.  Make your pool the surprise in a Faberge Egg.
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"You have neat tight expectations of what life ought to give you, but you won't get it.  That isn't what life does.  Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you.  Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition." --- Florida Pier Scott-Maxwell, Playwright, Jungian analyst.
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Pic, above, here.
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This garden, above, uses the same Formal Garden Design as the top photo: rectangle, focal point, flow, canopy, understory, floor, texture, color, shapes.
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Just because epiphanies arrive doesn't mean changes will arrive effortlessly or soon.
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Choosing to have a garden, the one in your head, is as simple as Dorothy learning how to go home.
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Choose.
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Garden & Be Well,   XOT
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A few  more from Florida Pier Scott-Maxwell.
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"You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.  When you truly possess all you have been and done ... you are fierce with reality."
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"Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion."
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"If we begin with certainties we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient with them, we shall end with certainties." --- Francis Bacon
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You realize this is a complete Garden Design course?  The important parts anyway.
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It's all important.  The Zen of Formal?  Easy to maintain, beautiful in all seasons, pollinators, lowers HVAC, raises property value. 
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5 years, this summer, in our ca. 1900 home.  Began gardening this month, finally.  No clue gardening would not begin for 5 years.  Repairing the pond, drilling a well, renovating sheds, moving sheds, building sheds, creating roads, clearing invasives, and clearing more invasives.  Life, my mom, caretaking, death, then major illnesses with Beloved.
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Starting wasn't something chosen or thought about or anticipated.  Apparently I had been at the bottom of the ocean, and shot up for air about 5am three weeks ago.  Could not breath, live, another day, without starting my garden.
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Quick phone call to Susanne Hudson, sourcing Conservatory parts, windows/French doors, Conservatory seating, somehow buying a honking huge antique library case too,  Honker.   Honk-er.
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Hedges, Conservatories, Tara Turf, Potting Table, Trees, and my library.  Leaving my 30 year garden, missed most, my built-in Library, and Conservatory.  Can't make this stuff up, the soul speaks.
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Did you notice, 'Conservatories', plural?  Life is good.  One of our tiny historic sheds, has a pair of shed roofs, each side, Beloved already built.  Soon, the East Conservatory will be completed, and hopefully, this year, we'll also build the West Conservatory.
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Their views wildly different.  The new potting table was sited at this shed, already I'm potting up and crazy happy.  Thankful of my years as a professional propagator at a nursery with 7 hoop houses, each with a different type of use; forcing, cuttings, plugs, annuals, perennials, herbs.
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Found living without a garden & library......untenable a moment more.  Getting a potting table, 3rd potting table across my adult life, previous 2 were wood.  This potting table, ca. 1940, is custom made, 2 shelves, backsplash, and stainless steel, from a sorority house at University of Georgia. 
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Have never felt so at home here.  Literally.  I'm home.  Garden, Conservatories, Potting Table, Library.  Every bit of air I shot upward for.  Whole again.
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Pic, above, here.

Conservatory, Pandemic, Gardening: How Do You Want to Live?

"I understand that to move close to God is to move close to everything that human beings have ever experienced.  And that, of course, includes a lot of suffering, as well as a lot of joy."  Parker Palmer
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"But from time to time, back in the woods that primitive wildness was there, and if that's all God is, I'll settle for it....easily and thankfully."  Parker Palmer.
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"And so I now see the soul as that wild creature way back there in the woods that knows how to survive in very hard places, knows how to survive in places the intellect doesn't, where the feelings don't, and where the will cannot."  Parker Palmer
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Conservatory built for Penny McHenry Hydrangea festival, above, by Tara Dillard & Susanne Hudson, Better Homes & Gardens magazine shoot.
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Too long without a garden, 5 years since moving rural, my body/brain/spirit has shot up from the ocean with 2 thoughts, evergreen hedges and a conservatory.
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"The point of being an artist is that you may live....you won't arrive.  It is an endless search."  Sherwood Anderson.
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Susanne Hudson's Conservatory, above, from Country Living magazine.
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"Vocation is a gift not a goal."  Parker Palmer
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Old Quaker adage, "Let your life speak."
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How did I get 5 years, without starting my garden?
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A life wants to live in me.  My garden let it grow.  As my garden spoke, it taught my soul to speak. 
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Then I moved away from my 30 year garden.
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Susanne Hudson's Conservatory, above,.
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Gardening is walking the talk of thinking.
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Conservatory, above, my previous garden.
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Susanne Hudson's Conservatory, above.
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What should your garden aspire to?  The best in you.  Do you have that clarity?
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Take from the Greats....they will never leave you once you've taken them.  TAKE.
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Susanne Hudson's Conservatory, above.
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The irony of my gardening is how much non-ironic work my garden does  on me.
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Moving from my 30 year garden, I miss most, my Conservatory.  It had only been there my last 3 years.  Go figure.
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Conservatory, above, built by Tara Dillard & Susanne Hudson.
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"Design at its core, thrives when a human being cares enough to do work that touches another --- it doesn't thrive when it gets more efficient."  Seth Godin
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Yes, I do believe my garden is me touching another.
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Conservatory, above, built by Tara Dillard & Susanne Hudson.
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With, 'conviction, commitment and conscience', plan your garden.  Each will return greater in forms you've never known, but always knew.
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Conservatory, above, built by Tara Dillard & Susanne Hudson.
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"(Iris) Murdoch begins by reflecting on the fundamental difference between the function of philosophy and that of art --- one being to clarify and concretize, the other to mystify and expand." Maria Popova
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Conservatory, above, built by Tara Dillard & Susanne Hudson.
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Beloved renovated a small historic shed on our property and moved it exactly where I indicated.  Smart man, things go south, my fault.  How did I know where to place it?  The GREATS.  Moved shed to a new garden room, and pulled strings from the main house, making sure the shed/Conservatory 100% parallel to main house. 
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One side of the shed will become my new Conservatory.  The open shed roof, and back wall are dimensions for the new Conservatory.  Drew a picture, with measurements, texted pic to Susanne Hudson, "Do you have any windows for me to buy for my new  Conservatory?"
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My previous Conservatory was over a decade of dumpster diving old windows and doors, literally.  This Conservatory has no luxury of time.  Instead, fitting what Susanne has, to my dimensions.
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No text in reply, instead, a PHONE CALL.  "How would you like 2 pairs of French Doors at the front of your new Conservatory?"  Best phone call of 2020 so far.
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"Bad writing is almost always full of the fumes of personality."  Iris Murdoch.
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Bad gardening is almost always full of the fumes of personality.  Tara Dillard
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Taking from the Greats, has its purposes.  Fumes of personality?  I adore gardens, photographed, hinting nothing toward what continent or era of the garden. 
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"The epic side of truth, Wisdom, is dying out."  Walter Benjamin
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"Wisdom in the age of information."  Maria Popova
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My Conservatory, above, previous garden.   
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Building my new Conservatory is a freedom, of knowing what I want, knowing how to get it, knowing what it will give me.  Back to the Greats. 
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My Conservatory, above, previous garden.
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At the front end of building Gardens, and Conservatories, I thought it was all architecture, engineering and labor. 
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It's still all those things, yet they're layered by greater gifts.  More important.
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"Knowledge hinges on an act of correlation and interpretation.  At the top is wisdom, which has a moral component, it is the application of information worth remembering and knowledge that matters to understanding not only how the world works, but also how it should work and that requires a moral framework of what should and shouldn't matter, as well as an ideal of the world at its highest potentiality."  Maria Popova
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My Conservatory, above, previous garden.
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My Conservatory, above, previous garden.
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Client Conservatory, above, I put into a Garden Design.  They hired me to brighten up a 'Dark Corner'.  Muse reigns.
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Conservatory, above, my previous garden.
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Susanne Hudson Conservatory, above.
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Your Home and Garden must have a name, a color trinity, and garden rooms, each with a name.
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Susanne Hudson Conservatory, above.
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Sending pic of measurements for my new Conservatory, quickly named it, East Conservatory.  Easiest garden name ever.  Sometimes naming can take over a year. 
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Susanne Hudson Conservatory, above.
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The shed has 2 nice sides, both with metal roofs Beloved built.  First moment the shed was moved to its new location, I knew, there will be 2 Conservatories.  Cannot wait for the West Conservatory.  It faces mostly wooded shade, acres of view, including a pond and fading lake.  East Conservatory faces a hedged garden I'm planting now.  Lots of good sun, some shade, a bit 'formal' easy to maintain.
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Client's Conservatory, everything you see, above, is rescued.  My Garden design put the shape of the conservatory into the plan, we had a great conversation, poof.  This is 'their' detailed design, not mine.  Fabulous.
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"Information is increasingly cheap and wisdom increasingly expensive...."  Maria Popova.
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Gardening, Pandemics, Conservatories, we're each seeking the same gifts, of those gifts with no price tag.  Grace, transcendence, beauty, a knowing of who we are, what we stand for, how to live in that grace everyday.  No matter what each day brings.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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Asked Beloved yesterday if I could borrow his old work truck for a few days, to pick up Conservatory parts with Susanne.  LIFE entered this story.  Alas.
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A much loved gardening friend, we've roomed several times across Europe and USA Eastern Seaboard studying historic gardens, and miscellaneous symposiums attended, flower shows, etc.  She's 77.  Had a chunk of breast cancer removed, feels great, gardening, busy.  She made the choice for no chemo/radiation. 
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Oh the things of life we've already shared.  More than that, blessedly, laughter always far greater than tears.
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Susanne knows her well, we 3 beautifully scarred, dusty, matriarchal elephants, each with our own continent, are slowly converging.  Soon, we'll all be in the far off garden of our friend.  Road trip.... 
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"I understand that to move close to God is to move close to everything that human beings have ever experienced.  And that, of course, includes a lot of suffering, as well as a lot of joy."  Parker Palmer