5 Ways to Get Subsidiary Focal Points Right

Not a focal point, below, but a grand subsidiary focal point.

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Garden Design Rule: One Focal Point per Area.

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Not my rule, but agreed to.

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What to do?  Invent another rule.

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Focal Points are allowed subsidiary focal points nearby if they recede, touch foliage, don't draw attention.   Can be numerous if properly chosen & sited.

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Focal Points & Subsidiary Focal Points must both be so wonderful they will be fought over at your estate sale.

Pots must be so wonderful they can remain empty.  This young man, above, has dead plantings and he's fabulous.
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More, he flows with the style of the home's interior.
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Dogs, 3 young children, parents each own a business, they have farm property nearby, and a lake house.
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Get the picture?  Zero time for the garden.

Designing for women 80+, taught me how to truly design with tough love.  A huge honor, and weight.  They demand beauty, must have unskilled labor to maintain & little of it, something coming into bloom every 2 weeks, focal points on axis from inside views into the garden.  Nothing can go wrong with the garden.  Nothing.  Health issues arise, the house needs a new roof, a toilet floods.  If the garden has issues, they may decide to move.  It is my goal, their garden gives strength & joy to carry on in their home.  
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pic this week in a client garden.
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 For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.

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

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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.

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Construction by Award Winning

Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

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

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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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Burn Your Light

Light from the garden, below.

Interesting legs, garden light a few of my favorite things.
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Oh my the criticisms, for decades, for leaning inward, to seemingly insignificant small joys.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay, "My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — / It gives a lovely light!"
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I met Peter Pan yesterday, and he wasn't lost.  With a bigger life I doubt I would have known.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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My bedroom, above, renovation still needs yellow/white French check draperies a la Charles Faudree.   Walls, Benjamin Moore - Sundress.  Hence you won't see more till then!  Painting by, Christine Gholson.  Truly, the light in my home is enriched by the garden.
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A quote in NYTimes long ago, "The more you go inward the more you outwardly connect." Pure permission, be-who-you-are.
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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.

                                                                                 .

Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon

  

Layers of Green are Best in Garden Design

Layers of green always work.

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Flowers.  Give-me-flowers-or-give-me-ugly seems to be the starter gardener mindset.
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Layers of green are pretty all year vs. a season.  Layers of green emit ion exchanges of serenity.
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I can assure you choosing layers of green vs. flowers is, "The spreading wide of narrow Hands To gather Paradise—", "I dwell in Possibility..." by Emily Dickinson.

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Odd how most of Garden Design is counterintuitive.

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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

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How do I know these things?  Queen of the flower method of garden design 12-step program.  No, I will not enable you.  My goal is to help you get rid of those pink elephants in your landscape.

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pic via Pinterest.

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If you want a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, and causes you to tap the brake pedal, as you look in the rear view mirror heading out, become my client, local or on-line.

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Award winning speaker, hire me to speak to your group, local or out-of-state.
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Garden books by Tara Dillard, Amazon.

Charles Faudree: Creating Relationship with Opposites

"Establishing a relationship between unlike objects adds to the interest of a tablescape.

An antique French figurine is a three-dimensional companion to the painted figures

on the English foot tub."  Charles Faudree

Contrast.  The Arts cross-pollinate.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO Tara
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Pic from Details, by Charles Faudree & Francesanne Tucker.
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For inspiration in the garden I have been going to interior design writers for decades.