Showing posts with label vanishing threshold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vanishing threshold. Show all posts

Monday, April 13, 2015

Leaving a Garden


Why pics in my garden are not perfect, but better.  It's more important for you to see, 'real'.  Why?  You must be able to walk into your garden, any day of the year, and be able to take a roll of 36 slides, each worthy of a magazine cover.  A major national magazine.  Allowing for a bit of primping, those pics must be worthy of an international book cover.
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Ready to play in my league?
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This morning, below, shot less than 5 minutes ago.  Walking to give the chickens a treat.




Stewardship of this garden began, horrendously, ignorant of stewardship.  Waiting for denial to pass, decades, Providence, nevertheless, allowed the garden to steward me.
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This is where I fly.
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Terrible phone conversation last nite with my sister.  Selling my home after 30 years, she asked, "Will you dig up all your plants and put in grass?"
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No, I responded, simply.
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If the next owner wishes to, that is their privilege.
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Here, this spot in my garden, pics above/below, a double axis, same path shot from opposite directions.  Merely 1 pivot point in my garden where I find relationship to Earth, myself, others, Providence, stewardship.  The more you go inward the more you outwardly connect.
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Lawn?  Fertilizers, weed killers, fungicides, all toxic to the water supply & mychorizzal fungi, earthworms, pollinators.  Mowing, watering, no shading of the house in summer.  Wrapping little strips of green meatballs and dead mulch.  High maintenance, literally, and figuratively.


More, my sister chastised me deeply for where I will be moving.  I listened, not responding.
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I am moving into my beliefs.  Yoked tightly with Providence.  Flying.  Ships were not built for harbor.  Sailing.
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"But here’s the deal: I know that life is an inexorable pull toward love, beauty, passion, delight, longing, disquiet, hunger, wildness, appetite, generosity, compassion, creativity and hope in a future beyond our limited present. "  Terry Hershey

A story from Terry Hershey,  " His dream started when he was in college. Jeffrey Coale wanted to own a restaurant. Training in cooking and restaurant management helps, but so does money. So Jeffrey Coale went at it methodically. He worked for a number of years as a government bond trader on Wall Street. At night, he attended classes at the French Culinary Institute.  He quit trading and took a job as an apprentice chef at the Louis XV restaurant in Monte Carlo. Next, he returned to New York to work at the Alain Ducasse restaurant. Wanting to refine his understanding of the wine side of the business, he then took a dream job as an assistant wine master at Windows on the World, at the top of the World Trade Center North Tower, in August, 2001.  Meanwhile, Mr. Coale, 31, sifted around for a location for his restaurant. He had looked at several properties in Greece and New York.
“He left really good money to make $10 an hour at Windows,” said Leslie Brown, his sister. “But Jeff never settled for something. He always followed his passion.”
Jeffrey died on 9/11.
Tragedy? Yes.
Someone wrote that there are many tragedies in life, but dying young while living a passionate life is not one of them. As Paul Harvey would say, “here’s the rest of the story…” After Jeffrey’s death, reflecting on that devotion, two friends switched to jobs that better suited their own true interests. Two other friends broke off unsatisfying relationships. In memory of Mr. Coale, they are going to follow their passions.
Maybe that’s where we get stuck. We’ve been invited to fly… but somewhere along the way we’ve been told that…
…we are not enough
…we are small and not sufficiently gifted
…we are carried by the winds of public opinion
…our identity is owned by shame
…we owe it to someone to be perfect
…we seem at the mercy of our grief or our rage"  Terry Hershey
.  Packing & staging & taking loads to the thrift store, in my library, I pulled yet another book for thrift store.  Bought years ago from the same thrift store, bag-of-books-$1, I hadn't read it.  The author's name popped, Terry Hershey.  Reading it now.
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In the coop, below, this morning.  After the massacre a couple of months ago 4 heirloom chickens remain, below, Alpha girl, marmalade, and her side kick Beta.  Horrifically injured during the massacre, I don't know why they survived, to thrive.  More, Alpha girl taught me a few things about alpha's. Gravely injured, 'alpha-dom' must be-will be maintained.  Body language, eye language, attitude kept Alpha girl alpha.  Unless I had witnessed this libretto I would not have believed it.

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 "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot."
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My Camelot, my garden, is within.  It travels with me.
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Yes, there is grief in this particular layer.  Deep.  Enough to keep me from flying?  Hardly.  Not flying would be fear.  Consistent foe, I've learned to silence, with a simple question, 'What would I do tomorrow if I were not afraid?'
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I first sought a beautiful garden, a place of grace & atonement.  More was given, than sought.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Lawn?  Too lazy for lawn & selfish.  My hunt is beauty.  Oh my, the riches of this hunt.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Fast Company: Science, Brains, High Ceilings

In a subdivision, along the side of the house, I've done this design, below, dozens of times.  It's a formula that never tires.  Allee of trees, shrubs, path, and done.
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Yet, why does this condensed space, typically between 2 houses, live 'large' ?

Boxwoods and Gravel

Creating a patio/terrace/deck garden room, below, again, I wonder, "what makes this small space live so large?"



Inside, below, with a vanishing threshold into the garden, I ask myself, "Why does this room live so big?"


Nicky Haslams Country House - WSJ.com#slide/2#slide/11#slide/7

Years spent wondering why my little garden, surrounded much-too-closely with neighbors at every view, lives so entirely large.  More, how does a small space live large AND feel like it's living on another continent in a different era?
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Seriously, years.  College degrees in engineering & horticulture, decades of reading garden/architecture books, decades attending garden lectures/symposia, with zero mention of small space gardens living large.
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Slow, but the answer arrived.  The sky.  All of the above Garden Designs use the SKY as an element.  Garden Design frames the sky.  Better, you own the sky.  No matter where the sky goes near your home, you own it.
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Another word for 'sky' in Garden Design?  Ceiling.
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This is going somewhere important, stay with me.
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High ceilings, in real estate, cost more money.  Across cultures/era/continents humans pay a premium for high ceilings.  Why?  Science, now, has an answer.

"... participants were more likely to judge a room beautiful if it had a high ceiling compared with a low ceiling. But the greater insight emerged when Vartanian and collaborators studied brain activity. They found heightened activity related to high ceilings in the left precuneus and left middle frontal gyrus—two areas associated with visuospatial exploration. The left precuneus, in particular, has been found to increase in cortical thickness after spatial navigation training.
So another part of the appeal of high ceilings seems to be that they capture our visual attention and engage our desire to observe our surroundings. Vartanian and company ruled out other explanations based on the imaging data, including the possibility that high ceilings simply put us in a good mood. That idea didn't pan out because participants looking at high and low ceilings showed no fMRI difference in brain regions related to pleasure, emotion, or reward."...
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Garden Design, using the sky, wields a potency to our brains we cannot produce ourselves.  Amusing.  Another tidbit from Providence, the first Garden Designer, and best.  
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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara
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From Fast Company, the full article:

Why Our Brains Love High Ceilings

Not just for bragging rights.
One of the first things a realtor will point out to prospective home buyers or apartment tenants is a high ceiling. To many of us, anything above the standard eight-foot ceiling is a big selling point. In recent times, home buyers have tended to pony up for the amenity of nine-foot ceilings; in the abstract, when added heights aren't adding to mortgages or rents, people prefer their ceilings 10 feet high.
Part of the appeal of high ceilings is no doubt related to a general preference for space, but the behavioral and brain evidence suggests there's more to it than that. Some research from a few years back ties high ceilings to a psychological sense of freedom. And new neuroimaging work shows that a tall room triggers our tendencies toward spatial exploration.
"You can imagine that our enjoyment of rooms with higher ceilings could be due to these two processes working in tandem," psychologist Oshin Vartanian of the University of Toronto-Scarborough tells Co. Design. "On the one hand, such rooms promote visuospatial exploration, while at the same time they prompt us to think more freely. This could be a rather potent combination for inducing positive feelings."

A Liberated Mindset

A few years ago, marketing scholars Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu wanted to see whether the height of a ceiling had any impact on the way a person thinks. So they recruited test participants for a number of different experiments and modified the study rooms so that some had 10-foot ceilings and others had (false) eight-foot ceilings. Meyers-Levy and Zhu also hung up Chinese lanterns so participants would look up and, consciously or not, process the ceiling height.
Working in a high-ceiling environment (left) put participants in a freer, more abstract mindset than did a low-ceiling setting.Via Journal of Consumer Research
Across several experiments, the researchers found evidence that high ceilings seemed to put test participants in a mindset of freedom, creativity, and abstraction, whereas the lower ceilings prompting more confined thinking.
In one test, for instance, participants in the 10-foot room completed anagrams about freedom (with words such as "liberated" or "unlimited") significantly faster than participants in the eight-foot room did. But when the anagrams were related to concepts of constraint, with words like "bound or "restricted," the situation played out in reverse. Now the test participants with 10-foot ceilings finished the puzzles slower than those in the eight-foot rooms did.
Another experiment asked participants to identify commonalities among a list of 10 different sports. Those in the high-ceiling group came up with more of these themes, and had their themes judged more abstract in nature, compared with participants in the low-ceiling group. Meyers-Levy and Zhu suspect this outcome emerged from the psychological freedom that comes with taller ceilings—a mindset that might also enhance creative thinking.
Altogether, they conclude in a 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, the research "shows that, by activating freedom-related or confinement-related concepts, ceiling height can be an antecedent of type of processing."

Ceiling Brain Scans

The new neuroscience study, led by Vartanian, had test participants look at 200 images of rooms while in a brain scanner. Half of the pictures showed rooms with high ceilings, half with low (below). Participants had an easy job: indicate whether they considered the room "beautiful" or "not beautiful." (The data actually came from an earlier study that looked at why our brains like curvy architecture, but were reanalyzed through the lens of ceiling height.)
Courtesy Oshin Vartanian
Little surprise, participants were more likely to judge a room beautiful if it had a high ceiling compared with a low ceiling. But the greater insight emerged when Vartanian and collaborators studied brain activity. They found heightened activity related to high ceilings in the left precuneus and left middle frontal gyrus—two areas associated with visuospatial exploration. The left precuneus, in particular, has been found to increase in cortical thickness after spatial navigation training.
So another part of the appeal of high ceilings seems to be that they capture our visual attention and engage our desire to observe our surroundings. Vartanian and company ruled out other explanations based on the imaging data, including the possibility that high ceilings simply put us in a good mood. That idea didn't pan out because participants looking at high and low ceilings showed no fMRI difference in brain regions related to pleasure, emotion, or reward.
The findings, reported in a recent issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, should be considered preliminary given the study's limitations. For one thing, the test couldn't control for factors besides ceiling height that might have led to "beautiful" ratings, such as the lighting or color scheme or curved design. And, of course, people weren't physically standing in a room with high ceilings, which could change the experience.
Higher ceilings activated the precuneus (left) and middle frontal gyrus—brain areas associated with spatial explortation.Via Journal of Environmental Psychology
But Vartanian says the research—in conjunction with the earlier work linking ceiling height and freedom—does add to our understanding of why people find high ceilings worthy of a real-estate premium.
"The combination of psychological and neural data can help us formulate a more complete picture of what is driving our choices," he says. "Knowing that people's preference for rooms with higher ceilings might be driven by the ability of those spaces to promote visuospatial exploration helps partly explain why people opt to live in such spaces, despite the fact that they cost more to purchase and maintain."


Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Ted Talk & Paid to Farm: Weight of Our Brain vs. Microbiome

“The three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you might be more important than every single gene you carry around in your genome...”  Rob Knight

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 "And we've just over the last few years found out that the microbes in different parts of the body are amazingly different from one another. So if I look at just one person's microbes in the mouth and in the gut, it turns out that the difference between those two microbial communities is enormous. It's bigger than the difference between the microbes in this reef and the microbes in this prairie. So this is incredible when you think about it. What it means is that a few feet of difference in the human body makes more of a difference to your microbial ecology than hundreds of miles on Earth."

You're 99.99 percent identical in terms of your human DNA to the person sitting next to you. But that's not true of your gut microbes: you might only share 10 percent similarity with the person sitting next to you in terms of your gut microbes. So that's as different as the bacteria on this prairie and the bacteria in this forest."


At Home with Bill and Giuliana Rancic. Furniture from Restoration Hardware. The long covered patio is divided into a dining area and a sitting area. | Traditional Home. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/restoration.html

"It turns out that our first microbial communities depend a lot on how we're born. So babies that come out the regular way, all of their microbes are basically like the vaginal community, whereas babies that are delivered by C-section, all of their microbes instead look like skin. And this might be associated with some of the differences in health associated with Cesarean birth, such as more asthma, more allergies, even more obesity, all of which have been linked to microbes now, and when you think about it, until recently, every surviving mammal had been delivered by the birth canal, and so the lack of those protective microbes that we've co-evolved with might be really important for a lot of these different conditions that we now know involve the microbiome."

Ted Talk, full transcript, above quotes, here.  Ted Talk, video, for talk, above.

pavers

More about children raised on farms healthier than those not, here.
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"The Government is Spending More to Train New Farmers Than Ever Before

Both veterans and under-resourced communities are top priorities."
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Did you know the age of the average USA farmer is... 58.3 years old?
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 “The USDA is very concerned about the continued aging of the American farmer,” Auburn says. “This program is part of a department-wide push to … keep the land under stewardship by people who care about it. It’s to have people interacting with their communities and to keep rural communities and economies healthy. It’s to have people out there interacting with consumers, who are increasingly interested in who it is who’s growing their food and how it’s grown.” 
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Education includes, "...raising poultry, sheep, and goats.
Annie Donoghue helps run the program along with her husband and project director, Dan Donoghue, and seven other partner organizations, which include USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the Farmer Veteran Coalition, the University of Missouri, and the National Center for Appropriate Technology.
Arkansas’ program offers free online courses in both English and Spanish, as well as hands-on, in-person public trainings and Armed to Farm boot camps for veterans, where participants learn the basics of poultry production, skills such as poultry-house building and even how to find appropriate markets for their businesses.
The program has been popular, as veteran-targeted education about this segment of agriculture was scarce. “There really wasn’t a lot of information for this group interested in poultry or small-ruminant production,” says Donoghue. “This program provides an opportunity for these veterans to consider careers in agriculture.”
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Wendell Berry has been writing about the loss of farmers, farm habitat, farm communities, and collateral loss of human health & knowledge gained from agricultural living since the 1960's.  He says,  "Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty — the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.
Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill.
Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Wendell Berry (Photograph: Guy Mendes)
There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair — done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.
Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness can forgive?
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments."
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Finally, the work of Andrea Wulf, Washington Post, review of, 

Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation

           " In this lively and deeply researched history, Andrea Wulf (best known for her prize-winning chronicle of 18th-century English gardening, “The Brother Gardeners”) examines the botanical pursuits of America’s first four presidents. Those men were, it turns out, obsessive gardeners, but gardening was much more than a preoccupying hobby. It was central to their vision of the American republic. Jefferson and Co. believed that the agrarian life would safeguard the new republic’s virtue and that the future of America lay with the independent farmer. As Washington summed up, “Our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands.”
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More about connecting the dots of agriculture & health, here.
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Connection of agriculture & horticulture?  It is our generation, post WWII, separating them.  Prior civilizations knew they were inherent to survival, no separation.  What does this mean?  Agriculture crops can yield 80% more with proper pollinator habitat.  That, is money in the bank.  More, Berry lovingly narrates the decimation of land, family farms, rural communities across USA as industrial agriculture with its machines & chemicals have waged war against an unwitting opponent, us.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pics via my Pinterest: Changes Board .    Need to get the Farming article, top of this post, further afield.  Anyone needing a grant, the article has great links.  Changes Board?  Collecting pics of good gardens needing a slight tweak.  Will use them in my Garden Design classes.  

Friday, February 27, 2015

Front Door: Before & After


Lovely home, below, builder-special landscaping.


Page Duke: Before the landscape design

What, below, happened?

Page Duke: A Strong Landscape Focal Point

Adjusting eyeballs back into sockets, the before/after leave only questions.  Did new owners move in?  How much property for the site, for the front yard?  What does the backyard look like, too small, slope, etc?  Who's brilliant idea to treat the front yard as a back yard?  Painting the brick, yes.
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Every penny of this hardscape goes into house value.  Wooooowzzzzzza.
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Views from inside the home changed.  Lifestyle of the home changed.
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Historic garden design, nothing new.  However, totally new here.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics Page/Duke.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Vision Quest: Landscape for a Barn

Vision questing a barn this month.  Construction was completed recently, and without intervention it is already perfect.  Anything done must appear not-done.
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Large, it will be used for family events, and professional.  Cars, people, caterers, ease of use for all, without hindrance to views..
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Maintenance must be insignificant.
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Knowns include, hiding hvac/septic/trash, gravel, stone, meadow, ease of flow for cars/walking, large groups/small groups, social events/educational events, exterior lighting, meals en plein air, an impromptu lair for the owners,

House in Blacksod Bay by  Tierney Haines Architects, Three sandstone wings protect an inner courtyard from fierce coastal winds at this seaside house in Ireland by Tierney Haines Architects.

An Irish landscape, above.  Stark, beautiful.

Historic Old Barn | Historic Barns

Simplicity, above, to the bone.  A bit of slope, perhaps add 'jewelry' with a stone wall, similar to the above using stones found on site.

Oxfordshire Barn Conversion by John Minshaw photo© Lucas Allen

At the doors, stone terraces, above, will keep most of the gravel off shoes, and interior vintage wood floors.
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Ina Garten uses hedges, below, at her barn.  I need to site the hedges to obscure the necessities, and allow 'flow'.  Must be deer proof & evergreen.



Need shade at the barn for outdoor meals.  Martha Stewart, used pin oaks at her barn, below.  Perhaps 2-4 oaks sited, just right, for a harvest table, and the tractor.


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Once the necessities are sited, gravel, stone, trees, hedge, flow, the barn is 'done'.  However, at that point, I'm open to adding a flourish, maybe a single espalier heirloom fruit tree, in the vein of Arne Maynard, below,
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 Image result for arne maynard
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Along with knowing lavender will be planted, and several types of self-seeding flowers into the meadows at the barn.
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This is the 1st salvo vision questing, next will be on site, alone for a couple of hours, then on site with the owner.  After that, we set it aside, let the left/right brain magic play.  Decisions made, then taken to the 'men' creating the literal landscape.  Their input, from a base of decades experience, filling out the full breadth of the team.  More changes.  Finally, a garden beyond measure, exceeding expectations.  Yes, exactly why I like working with a team.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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All pics from my Pinterest board, here.    

Friday, February 20, 2015

Garden Design: How to Handle the Car/Driveway

Beloved accuses me of being too wildly appreciative of the simplest elements of life.  Therein lies my wealth, is my response.
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Since the chicken coop massacre, a month ago, the pair of profoundly wounded hens are healing well. But, cannot get to their roost at dark.  Every evening I lift my girls to their roost.  This task enriches my soul beyond measure.  Merely thinking, 'I need to go lift my girls', as the chiaroscuro of dusk goes entirely black, makes my day.
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I keep a journal of pairs of words, and have begun noticing pictures insert themselves as pairs.  The latter due to Pinterest, for sure.  Favorite Pinteresting spot?  Claw foot tub, glass of wine, Pinteresting on my large galaxy note, cat sleeping nearby.  Ridiculous, my bad, told myself when the tub was put in a few years ago, 'no technology - only books.'  Lost the battle, joined the winner.


image

New landscape, above, with an old soul.  Adored, immediately, eyes locked/loaded, the car entry.  A lot of challenges in this landscape, myriad.  Each solution, a winner.  Why the car entry, so much?  Its location, scale, needs, necessities are each diminished, in abeyance to greater drama/importance, the front door.  Owner/designer got every layer right, including the 1st layer, William Morris's, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."   "The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life."
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I must know who you are at the curb.  Want to see, above, their interiors, art, books on the shelves, colors....  Garden design, above, is as beautiful in winter as summer/spring/fall.  Low maintenance & eco.

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This garden, above, honors the car gods, and slab-of-concrete-god.  Parking court reigns supreme.  Front door?  Welcome, ye car.  Welcome, people?  When the annuals die, shrubs stop blooming, what's left?  
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There is power in awakening to,  "...genuine interest in all the details of daily life."  Aside from increasing property value, decreasing HVAC costs, above, this homeowner will have less stress/frustration with caretaking their landscape and increased pleasure/calm/peace/atonement once the epiphany arrives, my garden needs to be ME.
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An afternoon Garden Design class, using only these two pics, is enough.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Top pic, Cote de Texas.  Bottom pic, here.
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Bottom pic is common USA landscape story.  House built, builder landscape, keep for decades, done.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Wallpaper Choices Designed for Winter

Drapes closed, below, Garden Design.


Was this my intention?  Design my garden to interior design my home with the drapes closed?
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No.
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Another garden invention is born.
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Another proclamation from Providence, "You're doing it right."
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Later today, the sun will move upstairs, and fill the guest room walls with wallpaper, 'crape myrtle trees'.


Of course I want more.  A bird to fly across the drapes, land on a branch, and sing.
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Atonement is the unbidden word arriving as innate necessity.  Begun in my garden, enlarged by Nature, filling my home.  Nurturing, in ways unknown to be needed, when this began 3 decades ago.
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Vanishing threshold, home & garden in atonement, enlarged to a trinity, home-garden-spirit.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pics taken a few minutes ago.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Free Garden Design

Modern 2,000+ years ago.  Modern today.
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No need to be an expert, to understand why garden centers are not 'on board'.



Calm.  Facade, bench, pots, gravel, fade their colors into each other.  I see the silhouette of branches in winter striking the house, and gravel.  I hear the leaves, wind rustled, see their fall colors.  Gravel crunching underfoot.
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This house doesn't make the Garden Design special, instead, the choice to have this Garden Design is special.
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Free Garden Design.  Equally at home with a brick ranchburger ca. 1963, pioneer cabin, starter home, $2 million home in a gated community.
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Myriad choices made with this Garden Design.  Especially adore all of the 'no' choices.
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Why is this Garden Design harder to choose than keeping foundation plantings, installed by the builder, and a pocked lawn needing mow/blow/go, fertilizers poisoning groundwater, zero aesthetics to increase property value, no choices for plantings to reduce hvac expenses, no thought for color, or pulling the foot outside to enjoy Nature?
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Picture from here.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Best Question for Work Success: Is it FUN ?

She called recently, "....help I'm in a new home.  A decade +/- has passed, since I was at her river front home, with tennis court, terraces, gardens, a place her husband loved to whip up 50 close friends for a Saturday dinner, often.  Perhaps the occasional movie star was feted at luncheon.  Not uncommon were the fundraising events, significant funds, successfully secured for their various beloved non-profits.
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Do you know what happens to women like this?  With age, their powers grow.  Do you know the key component of these women?  Aside from being matriarchs in every historic fiber, they are fun.
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(Bunny Mellon, below, is one of these women.)




Yesterday, we met at her new home, and began with a house tour, then lunch.
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Much to talk about, before the garden.  Of course the garden threaded thru all.
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She's in a chapter not of her choosing, her husband died 3 years ago.  Hope he heard her talking about him yesterday !
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Real estate could have been bought anywhere, and she chose the best.  Near children/grandchildren.  Plenty of mousetraps.  (Don't know what a mousetrap is?  Allurements, enticements, enjoy my homemade soups/cookies/grilling, play in the entertainment center stuffed with pool table/pingpong/tv/xbox/card table/stereo/sofas a veritable college fraternity house ca. 1980 at SMU but better...)
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The new arts center was mentioned for her city.  Asked who was doing it, she said, "The city."  Not that naive, I asked again.  The group was mentioned, and I said, "They are all women aren't they?", "Yes."
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Told her what I knew of a similar effort, created decade+ ago, she wanted the woman's name who started it, and details about how the $$$ came in.
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Done.  Then to the topic of romance & love.  Books, movies, careers of others, cooking, decorating, gardening.....
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Pets.  



We were in the sun room, 3 long walls of windows overlooking the garden.  Her desk, in the living room, faces the garden, exactly as Noel Coward would have placed it.
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Before the appointment she invited me to an upcoming lecture given by, Andrea Wulf,   The brilliant woman connecting the agrarian life of America's founding fathers to the content of their new form of government.


Childless, I had no playmates my own age since marriage.  Oh my, the gift of infertility.  Age 22, my friends were in their 70's.  My grandmother's era.  Tail end of that era, now passing.  Matriarchal, philanthropic, cooks, decorators, readers, gardeners, spiritual, humorous, self-esteem, modest, stewardship, and every undefinable good thing.
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Asked if she saw, Selma.  "No."  Told her she should, it's another tale of agrarian lifestyle helping to form America.  Martin Luther King created more than a non-violent protest, he used stewardship of livestock to protect his flock, literally.  Pastor-guiding-a-flock was not cliche for March'in Luther, blessedly it was real,  Selma was poorly done, hope someone truly does MLK properly soon.
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Then, her team.  Girlfriend, has 'Thomas'.  He gardens, cooks, decorates, irons, does laundry, opens boxes from moving & puts them away.  In addition, she has Mr. Construction, Mr. Architect, and me.  Noticed, years ago, smart chicks, age 50+, all have a team.  Yes, I have a team.  And their names are only passed along in the manner of stewardship of their time/talents.
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Ok, we finally made it into the garden.
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More fun.  When I go back to draw en plein air, I will get pics for you.  Yesterday was too full with work/laughter.
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One thing I know for sure, if it's not fun with a client, it is not a good match or we are doing something wrong.  Truly, that is my barometer for work.  Is it Fun?
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Poorly describing sublime attitudes, above, someone with 'credentials' describes them worse than poorly, below, he is wrong on a logarithmic scale.  More terribly, it's in description of Bunny Mellon.

The NYT article quotes John Wilmerding, an American art scholar and trustee of the National Gallery of Art in Washington:
Bunny was part of a generation that no longer exists today: an amateur collector with a sure eye, great taste and upper-class refinement, who bought across the board, from expensive jewelry and paintings to trinkets.

Upper-class refinement?  Not only a small lens, cracked.  Bunny's generation is still here, at the tail, but still here.  Performing their magic with all Providence has passed to them.  Bunny was Bunny in spite of her 'upper-class refinement'.  I know several of these women, money is not in great sums for most, but their attitudes/actions trump money.  
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Bottom pics, La Contessa .  Top pic, via Lunch & Lattte.
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Dear John Wilmerding, Bless your heart.  Most don't 'see' the template of personality in women similar to Bunny.  When you see these women, without a cracked lens, you will see them many places.  Ironically, I'm sure at least one of them, if not more, have you in their flock.