You've told me so much and you know the things you need to know. Like ignore all the "fertilize with K and P annually". In Knoxville, at the University, Ione planted a tea noisette, Duchesse de Auerstadt, in river loam about 100 yards from the Tennessee River. (I grow a clone of that, several hundred feet higher and in tight red clay. You'd think they were different roses, but they-from the same supplier- are in different microclimates and soils.) You are in the heat 'island' that is the Nashville Basin. Your soils are self fertilizing but for the N. If I were you, I'd collect Tea Noisettes and make the most bodaceously beautiful rose fence in Tennessee. I might even be tempted to put a few Hybrid Perpetuals in for splashes of red-purple color. Foget the once bloomers. With your water conditions, with the nutrients that are in your river soils, the only thing you need to do is work to keep your pH in the zone where the K and P aren't tied up as salts and stay available to your roses' roots. That you don't have abundant cedar, BTW, tells me that you don't have a lot of limestone anywhere near the surface. In my fields I can almost tell you where there are subterranean limestone remnants under the soils. Even the cedar seeds don't sprout in my red clay. As for trees to tolerate in your fenceline: yes to dogwoods and redbuds- they aren't that bad. No to almost everything else. In your soils with ground water, you may find ten to fifteen years of vertical growth each year. This year we are sufferening the ones we didn't cut back last fall and that loved the inch a week of rain we had all of last year. Kill: all hackberries (they make good firewood). They are the host to wooly hackberry aphids and the aphid poop drops heavily and then gets a black fungus on it and the fungus doesn't wash off. Really ugly when it drops on roses, and everything else. When you get to Knoxville, let me know. I've probably got some suckers you can use. More later, Ann

I don't really get the obsession w/ being timeless -- My purpose has always been in the pursue of beauty (together with function, of course). I bet most people who design a so-called timeless interior (or piece of art/furniture) didn't set out to achieve that. They set out to create something beautiful, and if that happened to stand the test of time, great. If not, who cares---great art are often misunderstood. hehe.. :-D 99.9% of the things in my house are bought used, and are often old (not antique). I don't know if they are *timeless* but in my eyes they are beautiful -- that's good enough for me. :-D the other 0.01% of our stuff are just really ugly, but they are loved & well regarded by my children/DH so okay, I'll let them take a pass. :-D I read magazine (uber glossy ones) a lot. I also kept older ones. There are always things to be learned, from the past & present -- There are a lot of bad rooms in 1930s magazines just as there are many of wonderful room in 2009 issues. I don't read magazines (or even catalog) so I can learn the newest trend (and jump on the bandwagon). I read to learn new ideas, to see beautiful things and figure out why are certain rooms more appealing than others. What really bugs me are new things that pretend to be old. Fake patina gets me. There is no shame in being new. I like patina that's there because the piece has been loved been used been around. So to answer your question, Parma, in order to decorate in a "timeless" style, one must decorate with things (which you think) are beautiful & useful, & well loved. As for what would stand the test of time, I think in general, a piece of furniture that has nice scale, good proportion, and well crafted has better chance of surviving the design Darwinism compare to something that's poorly designed.

I could echo a lot of what everyone wrote. Especially allison's list of things that have remained the same. The only difference is that I'm not as keen on fall colors. I love blue and white in fabrics as well as transferware, yellow (especially for walls), and have been adding more green and red/coral in recent years. My taste has been pretty consistent over the years (I'm in my mid-50s). I started off like shivece, following my parents' style with the comfortable couch, classic chairs, Persian rugs, but ended up going off in a more English country direction. Plus my parents were never interested in antiques, unfortunately. In high school I started buying shelter magazines and tearing out pages which I kept in a binder which I took to college with me lol. I remember swooning over and dreaming about floral Sanderson curtains back then. I've always loved the English country look, well-worn and well-loved full of interesting and meaningful things. Since high school and college, I've pretty much refined and distilled my tastes. I'm much less tempted by decorating "tangents" now that I'm more certain and confident in my tastes. The major change I think has been a change in preference from blowsy, chintz-y florals to more restrained florals and block prints. I have to be careful all the time to remember to vary the size of prints because I'm naturally drawn to smaller prints. In my late 20s, I had first a rental and then a co-op apartment in NYC, where I was born and raised, and a good job and was able to start buying some good furniture to the vintage pieces I'd bought. A few antiques, a good sofa, some nice reproduction pieces from Baker. At the time, Macy's and Altman's had beautiful furniture departments (with antique, new, and reproduction items), and ABC Carpet & Home wasn't trendy and overpriced. Things came to a screeching halt in terms of decorating style a few years later when I married and moved to a farm in rural western Canada. This was before the internet, and the only place to buy furniture that wasn't a six-hour roundtrip was Sears. My husband had bought the farm with a sad little farmhouse just before we met (terrible timing). He had painted everything a cold hospital white (he thought it looked clean), painted the baseboards a cool light grey because he thought it was practical (this was in the early 90s so he was ahead of the curve lol), in the kitchen a horrible white, grey, and mauve-y pink sheet vinyl flooring, and in the rest of the house, cheap grey wall-to-wall carpeting. The only furniture he had was, echoes of czarinalex, a horrible 70s sofa -- orange, mustard, and dark brown acrylic plaid -- and matching swivel/rocking arm chair. The place looked better with my furniture (the sofa got exiled to the basement, and the chair stayed with a sheet over it because it was VERY comfortable and made a great nursing chair for three kids in five years), though I could never get my Persian rug to stop "creeping" in the living room over the wall to wall carpet. We did repaint the walls, but all of the flooring stayed until it wore out and could be replaced; plus we knew we wanted to build a new house and wanted to save our money for that instead of replacing what was, as my grandparents would have said, "serviceable". I did manage to find some gems here and there -- like the large Chinese blue and white fishbowl planters I found at a garage sale (which I keep ferns in). And then the internet arrived, and I was able to read and learn more, including at GardenWeb and blogs (for the love of a home, Ben Pentreath, etc) and find stores and shops online, esp Etsy and Ebay. About nine years ago my parents died and left a NYC apartment full of stuff like oriental rugs and Kindel and Henkel Harris furniture, and a vacation house in the Caribbean with a few things. Through some hard work and creativity, we were able to bring back a number of things, and planned around them for the new house we finished building last year. It's not always easy to hang tight when a favorite all of a sudden becomes trendy. Though living in the back of beyond, sometimes it's helpful when certain things -- like ikat, suzani, block prints, blue and white porcelain/ceramics -- become popular because then they end up at places like Anthropologie, Pottery Barn, and Winners/TJ Maxx where I have access to them : ) . Especially when the trend is truly over and done with, and the markdowns are huge lol. allison, my parents were firm believers in your rule #1 and I've tried to follow it but sometimes it can be hard, especially living here when I'm never sure what I might be able to find/source.

Feathers, I love her style, although it is so different from my own! We have neutral, light colors mostly in our home. I love her black fireplace - did you see it??? (ps go through her feed - maybe saved in her stories, but see how she did those nightstands!) I love real wood also - actually most anything wood in our home is antique, and I love that patina. HOWEVER, in our own bedroom I felt like we had too many wood pieces (besides a metal headboard), so the chests on either side of the bed are painted (off-white). I like the occasional piece of painted furniture added in. Too, although the wood pieces in our bedroom are not from a set - I hate "matchy-matchy" and felt we needed something to break it up. I think a painted bed could do the trick. And now that I keep seeing that bed, it's making me consider it again!