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Styling Outdoorscapes

Bloom with Design-ly Delights in Healing Gardens – a Tea-zer

One route to healing is down the garden path of delight — positive, happy, giggle moments of delightful distraction.

Because we need to be delighted in life. To be cloaked in naturally occurring opportunities of joy and beauty. We need to grab any and all possible moments where delight blooms. Grab it. Dance in it. Kick the off shoes of the monkey mind for a moment and tip toe through the dog-gone tulips.

Simply, delight.

Red Bird Restorative Garden Tea Table detial - glass water

Special moments where a communion with nature is had, unique and unto themselves, where we are most positively distracted and transported to that happy place — if only for a moment — is preventative medicine.

… a delightful moment of lightness… a reprieve from brain fatigue.

Red Bird’s garden heart design-love-work is to transport you (and your brain) by indulging in a healing garden moment that researchers call “positive natural distraction”.

“A positive distraction is an environmental feature or situation that promotes an improved emotional state in the perceiver, may block or reduce worrisome thoughts, and fosters beneficial changes in physiological systems such as lowered blood pressure and stress hormones.” (Ulrich, 1999, 49 as quoted in Therapeutic Landscapes by Clare Cooper Marcus & Naomi Sachs)

 

Delight = insight and #whatappliesinthegardenappliesinlife. Tweet: 1 route to healing is down the garden path of delight. #whatappliesinthegardenappliesinlife @AnnieRedBird http://ctt.ec/3pa3s+ [tweet that!]

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A Design-ly Delight in bloom…

Garden tea party anyone?

“Why yes,” Annie said. “That would be brew-tea-full!” …and I’ll take some honey with that. (No really, good raw honey, like that lovingly crafted and locally made by Dogwood Bee Farm).  

Red Bird Tea Table Pairings

Sometimes we need levity. Perhaps more often than not. Lightness. Giggle moments. And that’s just what I have planted for you my friends. A sweet, garden giggle moment. Something for your eyes (and soul) to drink up and enjoy.

To spark inspiration. To feel good.

One of latest planting & furnishing designs is shared in these photos. Let’s call it a garden tea party table, shall we?  Fingertip gardening that will tickle the plant fancy, filled with tea-worthy edibles – herbs and flowers – ripe for springily insights awaits. (For a list of Brew-tea-full herbs for Peace, Health & Inspiration, you’ll want to read this.)

Hee!  It’s a Red Bird-er kind of tea party table inspired by another table. One with giggle moments. One with unique character – meaningful & personal – this is so very quite contrary suitable for your Alice moments just as any design-ly delightful, restorative garden element shall be.

Red Bird's YGP show display 2014-full view-Tea Table

Where can you find such a thing? Glad that you asked.

Come partake and par-tea with Red Bird and the great folks from Bauman’s Farm & Garden and Monrovia at the 2014 Yard Garden and Patio show and take a little tea-hee-hee timeout.

Ooh! Need a dose of design-ly delightful support and style inspiration in your garden? To match your life + style? Be in touch over here.

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What healing delights are you planning to design into your garden this spring? Share in the comments below.

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"Elements of Life" comes to life at Portland Home & Garden Show

The beginning of the year, in the dark of winter and muffled by the way-too-much-snow, this little Red Bird designed a display garden entitled “Elements of Life” for landscape contractor client Earthworks Landscape Inc.  The essence of the design of “Elements of Life” honors stone, water, fire, earth, metal, wood with a Pacific NW twist.  This garden began its 5-day bloom yesterday for the 2009 Portland Home & Garden Show. This event and the intoxicating garden shows on tap for the next couple weeks, mark a rite & promise of spring.  A giddiness about blooming, growing, harvesting, creating, combined with rituals of picking flowers, lazing in the sun, walking on warm summer nights hits the air and is multiplied a thousand times over by the throngs of garden lovers that attend these shows.

Red Bird Design's "Elements of Life" for 2009 HGS

Red Bird Design's "Elements of Life" for 2009 Portland Home and Garden Show

Do me a favor, run your hands across the “weeping” stone sentinels that mark the portal of the space — I call these rocks the “guardians” – as they are solid, poised, relentless in their watch over peace.  Who couldn’t use a couple of guardians of peace these days, huh? Cozy up a bit while gazing at the fire which “dances” in the rustic pots – the fire bowls. Do they mesmerize? Does the fire heat and captivate? Take a seat nearby the fire bowls on the stone benches – part of the retaining wall – “guardians” laying on their sides, shaded overhead by the canopy of early spring blooming trees. Gotcha now with a little “prospect and refuge” action and you didn’t even know it, did ya?

Stone Forest - the Guardian of Your Peace...

Stone Forest - the Guardian of Your Peace...

Display garden design is crazy, weird, delightful and an opportunity to express sentiments beyond the typical “marketing” or “sales” realm. Meaning: share goodness, information, inspiration, education, knowing smiles and nods.  (At least this is so for this little Red Bird.)  It is a pleasure to contribute to a sense of hope and the reliable ritual of spring’s renewal. So for those of you able to make the show, stop in and grab a momentary natural distraction (in therapeutic garden design terms). The display sits in the same spot as the 2008 “Restore Outdoors” display garden (C Hall, Space G11).

Come on in for Elements of Life

Come on in for Elements of Life

My belief is that you should feel a sense of sanctuary & inspiration in your own home – your outdoor “rooms”.  I want the unique goodness inherent in your out-of-doors to bloom – as an extension of the goodness inherent in you.

What will we find, tap, uncover that reveals your very own guardians of peace, your own essential elements to live? 

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