Gardeners: Tools to Keep in Your Car

Most days of my adult life are spent in beautiful gardens across the globe, designing gardens for future beauty, or in my own sweet garden.

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My friend Susanne Hudson's garden, below.  Girlfriend is all about her green-brown-white.

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So.  I am too.

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Susanne & I are scheduling a field trip to 3 gardens.  Negotiations are tricky.  Busy lives.

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Each garden abides in all Providence & intellect & will & a clinical passion creates.

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If you understand a 'clinical passion' for gardening (antiques, art, pets, a potager, music, books, you are my friend. )

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My newest best garden tool, below.  Stetson.  Shades without blocking peripheral vision.  

Parked in a magnolia tree at Stone Mountain Park, above/below.

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Raspberry red vintage table cloth is for emergency picnics or eating dinner out unexpectedly & needing something for the chill.  I'm a step ahead of E.M.Forster in A Room With a View.

  " I never venture forth without my mackintosh squares."  "With many a smile she produced two of those mackintosh squares that protect the frame of the tourist from damp grass or cold marble steps."  "Miss Bartlett had lost a mackintosh square. Phaethon had lost the game. That last fact was undeniable. He climbed on to the box shivering, with his collar up, ..."  

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For your clinical passion, I offer, mackintosh squares & a Stetson.

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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.

Friendship is to Bare Witness

No time for cooking she finessed a curried chicken salad over arugula, added fresh fruit and a poppy seed vinaigrette.

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Beautifully served & delicious it's in her DNA along with interiors & gardens.

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She's the friend you don't speak with for months then conversation picks up mid-sentence.

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The friend warping time, hours are minutes.

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The friend knowing every terrible thing about you & loves you more.

In her new home for a year, I hadn't seen it yet.

Her grown child has a life-threatening illness.  Her choices, hard.  She never chooses the easy road.

For a decade I have watched, listened.  Of course we've done a lot of laughing.  How else to get thru?

 First is was her house she surrendered, then a series of other abodes.  Each smaller.  Every time more antiques sold.



Never has she lived without beauty, love, or laughter.  Nor tightly bound to them, tears, frustration, fear.

This is her smallest home yet.  A masters class in which pieces of furniture, art, books to keep.  What is needed, useful, beautiful.

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We have no less fun, or love, than in that huge 1st home.

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Instead, more.

This time she's landed with a roof top garden.  

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Not a garden of her own.

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She's not had a garden of her own for a long time.

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She's never complained

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Hard choices, hard truths, rich living.

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We grieve together, some.  Mostly, we are enriched & grow love in our friendship.  

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As friend, it has been my job to bare witness.

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In return, she's watched my hard choices, ugly truths.

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We speak plain to each other.  True grit.

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Mostly, we laugh.  And love one another.  No matter what.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics at my friend's home.  Sun was hot on my legs/toes and felt like the best hot steam sauna ever.

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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.

Pinterest: Honey Holes vs Contrived

Filling  Outdoor Living & Exterior Design, and, Vanishing Threshold: House + Garden, on Pinterest is interesting.  Contrived pictures, most often, come from (USA) magazines.
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About 2 months, so far, into Pinterest, for landscapes & gardenesque homes, I know where the honey holes are.
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With so much honey why see contrived?
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Pinterest is wildly successful, and I know why.  Whenever I must wait, Pinterest is my new best friend.  Pretty, fast, always learn something, happy, wide range of delightful topics, new ideas, classics, and at least 1 koan/week.
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Beloved is forever busy, when we finally order dinner he has time to check emails etc.  Me?  Instead of 'waiting' for him to finish I'm zipping around Pinterest.  Guess who has the 'wait' now?  Priceless.
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Honey holes?  Europe.  Australia
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You?  Are you a Pinterest honey hole and don't know it yet?  Stay with me.  Are you not doing Pinterest?  With total selfishness I want you to consider Pinterest.  It is your eye, mind, experiences, wisdom, a life well lived, foods tasted, pets loved, children laughed with, museum hours logged, books read, that will choose topics for boards and then your CURATED choices.  Yes, in selfishness, that's what I want.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pic via Pinterest.
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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.

Handling Tulips & Dog 'Business' in the South.

She doesn't ask for much.  Her backyard is tiny, she has a beloved large dog, mostly shade, a bit of sun.

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She wants a pretty little garden to look upon from her new screened porch, convenience for her dog's 'business', a few vegetables-herbs, and TULIPS.

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She's awaiting several surgeries: hips, knees.

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No mobility to be in her tiny garden.

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Full-time job.

5 shiny new galvanized garbage cans will hold her veggies-herbs-TULIPS, aka potager.

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Lined up in the sun.

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Everything in her garden designed for unskilled labor, at most 1/month.

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Drip irrigation to her galvanized garbage cans and newly planted shrubs.

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Old House Gardens, and, Brent and Becky's Bulbs are the sources I've given for her TULIP order.

Horticultural humor using the garbage can lids as plant saucers.

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Sign-up for the newsletters, above.

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“A little studied negligence is becoming to a garden.”

— Eleanor Perenyi, 1918-2009, American author of the modern classic Green Thoughts

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Old House Gardens, always begins their newsletters with a quote, above.

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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

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I took the pics last year at James Farmer's store in Perry , GA.

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For Heidi, her dog, a wide gravel path curves thru the entire garden.  Fat gravel, is unable to lodge in a large dog's paws.  Easy to pick up Heidi's 'business' with a pet scooper.  Tulips are mostly annuals in the South, they perform best from containers.  Cannot wait to see which tulips she orders, I know she has a purple fetish.

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My design included the new screened porch and my team completed it earlier this year.  We are sourcing furnishings now.  Yes, we are having fun !

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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.

Three Best Mistakes to Make in Your Landscape

Choose to make garden mistakes on the side of too simple, too little, too plain.

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Better to want more later than dig-up, move plantings, replace a now-thought-cheap/tacky-bench, regret the shape-style-color-of.....

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Long term, cute in a garden grates.  Whimsy is better.

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Be wary of 'words' in a garden.  They hold thoughts hostage that should flow randomly, Cole Porter's, Don't Fence Me In.

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Of course there are exceptions to all of the above.  Indeed.

This morning, above/below, Tomato & Hydrangea.  Perfect name for a spiked tea & scones cafe.

Feeding cats & chickens, assessing what the night wrought & will it rain today.

Tomato still in its peat pot with cellophane wrap & tags.  Awaiting a much larger pot & bamboo cane trellis.  Perhaps this weekend?  Hydrangea blossoms hanging lower, petal margins crispier, will I cut to dry or leave to enjoy from the windows?

Calm.  Boring is good.  Idle chit-chat in the head.

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Something new to learn about Social Media.  Facebook cannot control pictures during war.  Images seen cannot be unseen, merely absorbed into a safe, prayerful, place.

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Again, my Garden working for me.

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Have you watched the award winning foreign film, Burnt by the Sun ?    "The film depicts the story of a senior Red Army officer and his family during the Great Purge of the late 1930s in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Like a tragedy bySophocles, Burnt by the Sun takes place over the course of one day."  Wikipedia

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Oddly, it's beautiful. 

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Glad it taught my heart to assimilate what I saw yesterday within mundane ubiquity of beauty in a tomato & hydrangea.  The gift of choices, health to act upon them, perhaps a dinner party in late summer honoring the last of the tomatoes.  With dried hydrangeas in a vase.

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This is freedom.

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Garden & Be Well,  XO Tara

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Pics taken in my garden this morning.

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 For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

.

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.

The Unmentioned Design Element in the Garden

Yesterday, blowing my conservatory, I realized no one mentions a salient fact, lamps/sofas/tables/etc must be blower proof.

Pruning/blowing/digging/etc in the garden is my chance, on Earth, to experience in metaphor,
"When Jesus rose from the table and began to wash the feet of the disciples (John 13:4), He was doing the work of the lowliest of servants. "

Intuitively I know if I stop honoring/practicing Servant layers in my garden there is great chance I shall never do those layers again.

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Atonement.  The shining word, above all others, I feel in my garden.

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A friend's word, Abiding.

Never do I wish to stop dropping to knees, feeling Earth on my skin, or sweat begin to drip, nor forgo the bruising/scrapes gifting my soul.
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And, oh my, the engagement of intellect.
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Nature always wins.  Me win?  Decades past that embarrassingly small desire.  At times my garden lets me flow pure with Nature.  (What does that mean?  Experiencing, as "Joseph Campbell wrote " with a quote from Ovid's Metamorposes, " ... And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.")
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If someone else is paid to do the work of my garden, where then is my atonement?  The delight of eye-hand-mind-spirit.  More, where to gain the epiphanies, friends, career..........

Many layers of good garden design, above.  A garden design class, almost, in a single picture.
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Yes, this garden room can be blown without destroying how it looks.
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Yet, a broom is always at hand.  At present broom & fallen crape myrtle blossoms are the soliloquy of atonement.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pics Penelope Bianchi.
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 For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.

                                                                                 .

Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

.

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.

Considerations for Designing a Pool

Designed another pool yesterday, pool house too, though it wasn't requested.  Pool house along with decking & pool shapes were 'self-evident'.  Also 'self-evident' was the master bedroom bay window becoming French doors leading to a new terrace flowing to the new pool.

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Another meeting must take place after Pinterest boards have been exchanged.  

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That meeting will include: clients, pool contractor, general contractor, & me.

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Pool, decking, & pool house dimensions will be lined/flagged on site.

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And, the interior of the pool will be arranged along with color choices.

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Ironically, choosing the pool's interior will take the most time.

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Garden design is all about contrasts, and repetition, exactly why these umbrellas 'work'.  

 This client, above/below, spends a great deal of time in the Caribbean and wanted those colors.  She also knew she wanted a rectangular pool, he wanted turf around the pool.  After that, I was on my own.
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Creating the curve, below, was inspired from their new kitchen with marble topped island in the same shape.  Bulls-eye, there was the contrast.

More than choosing paint color, which you live with for years before changing, designing pools is a single shot.  

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Often, I'm not the 1st person designing the pool.  That person typically works for a pool company.

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My scope is from the center of the home to the property lines.  

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 What does that mean in real life?  The 1st pool designed was a Gilligan's-Island-Wig-Wam-Waterfall-Snaking River-Infinity Edge-Gobs of Stone-Trendiest Tiles of the Moment-Landed From Mars Behind the House entity.

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Oddly, I've never worked a site needing that pool.  Would love the chance !  Less the trendy tiles & horrible stone configurations, instead more of a lost- world- found-only-great-literature-can-describe.(Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Welty, Nabokov, Byatt, Austen, Forster, Woolf, honestly, why think small.)

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Lawn, above, is not sickly, just has plenty of visits from the new puppy!

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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara

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Pics taken in client garden last month.  We built the pool 2 years ago & are adding a perennial garden.

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My Pool board on Pinterest.

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For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

.

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.

Keeping & Fixing

Along the side of her home, below, a mass planting of hosta.

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Most of the year these hosta are herbacious.

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During fall they are literally senescence yellow.  With tired mulch.  Two layers of death !  Welcome home.

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She asked for a design in front & back.

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How could I not address the hosta along the side?

My ego isn't about ripping out & starting over.  A bigger challenge is, keep offensive plantings & turn them to delight.

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In the South, blessedly, sasanqua thrive.

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Two sasanqua have been planted & will be espalier pruned flat against the wall.  No trellis or wires needed.

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And all that hosta?  Remains in place.

Soon, these 3 gallon espalier sasanqua will be lush plantings, diminishing the impact of gas-a/c.  And the fleeting impact of the hosta.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
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Pics taken at a jobsite this month.
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Sasanqua espalier are often in my Southern garden designs.  Never do we install already espaliered Sasanqua.  Too d&*% expensive.  Instead, we do the pruning.
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Of course we have to rip plantings out.  Decades of plant-shape-only installed by builders helps no one and literally decreases property values while sometimes cracking foundations-drives-paths.
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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.

Most Wanted in the Garden

This is what I want, below, from my garden.  Every day, to look out from the windows of my home and think, "Oh WOW."

More, I want to walk in my garden, any day of the year, and take a roll of gorgeous 36.

View from the street, above, thru my tiny orchard to little cottage.

Oakleaf hydrangeas, above, drying in the garage next to my car.

Attention to detail, inside/outside.

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Everyday clients change the scope of their project, it may rain for 30 minutes delaying a dirt delivery 2 days, a supplier does not have what they promised,  mis-communication with a subcontractor,  an employee forgets a tool or gas/oil mix for equipment thus stopping the work totally.

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All expected, & normal, business.  

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And why I crave the beauty/solace of my garden & home.

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A realm of grace feeding the spirit.

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  What do you want from your garden?

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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Pics from my home/garden this year.

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 For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

.

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.