paulag

On Friday, as we set up our Sylvan Sport GO mobile adventure gear, a large tribe of turkeys snacked in the underbrush between campsites. Perfect weather, an empty campground, miles of trails to walk with pristine mountain streams rife with trout and only an hour’s drive from Cashiers. What better formula for an outing close to home?

It got even better! The Mountain Life Day, held on September 20 at Oconaluftee Visitor Center in the Mountain Farm Museum Complex located in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, took us completely by surprise. Here gentlefolk in historic garb were making provisions from scratch the old-fashioned way. Applesauce from hand-peeled apples was heated to a furious bubble in a black kettle, fired by hickory wood and stirred with a long wooden spathe.  Yummy samples were in hot demand.

Raw cane syrup, a pale green color, crushed by mules on a circular tether between two stones, was poured into a set of copper toughs fired to an intense heat to dehydrate and thicken the sweet molasses. A soap maker shared his technique for adding lye created from soaked ash into lard drawn from livestock fat to make soap. The doll maker created exquisite toys fashioned from simple cornhusks and silks. Generational rocking chair makers joined growers of over 300 antique apple varieties and examples of wild crafted home remedies for arthritis and colds.

The Oconoluftee Visitor Center is in high gear as a $ 2.5 million new building complex is being erected to house audiovisual and interpretive exhibits by the  spring 2011. The old visitor center will be retained as a research and teaching facility.

Smokemont Campground is just a stones throw from Oconoluftee. We parked our adventure gear in a shady campsite, put on our boots and set out on a beautiful 4 mile hike adjacent several streams on a gently graded path. Two trout fishermen worked the banks and shared their success with landing rainbow, brook and brown trout.  Further upstream, we dipped our rods into the waters seeking the elusive trout, finding our efforts unrewarded, but the scenery well worth the effort!

Since our marriage 26 years ago, Hugh and I enjoyed backpacking mountains and lowlands in beautiful areas. We are not car campers, or “front country users”, in the parlance of the national park brochure. However, anyone who knows me, knows I am a gear junkie.

The recent arrival of the Sylvan Sport GO on the market hit gear management on the head. Made locally at Cedar Mountain, NC, the GO is a camping innovation. It is a convertible wheeled apparatus made to haul 800 lbs of kayak, bicycles, small ponies and a built-in tent behind a 4 cylinder vehicle.  It is “heaven on toast points” for anyone needing a small trailer for light duty projects, plus has a wonderful, spacious sleeping tent that parachutes out from the clever roof storage providing for a family of four.

Our trip was easy, inexpensive at $20 a night for a camping spot, and we could enjoy painting, hiking, fishing, bicycling, dining and sleeping with all our gear easily accessed.  When our car gave up the ghost with electrical problems on Sunday’s departure date, the helpful Smoky Mountain  National Park VIP volunteer rangers in their electric rescue vehicle, gave us a boost and a telephone. Sequohia tow company from Cherokee took both our CRV and the GO back to Cashiers.

After towing and car repairs, we didn’t exactly save money or catch fish on the trip, but loved every minute of our outdoor adventure.

Getting there:

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park is  located on Hwy 441 adjacent Cherokee, NC.  www.nps.gov/grsm and is about 60-75 minutes from Cashiers. 1-865-436-1200.

The Oconoluftee Visitor Center is the entry point into the park. Smokemont Campground is the closest front campground to this entry.

Reservations  1-877-444-6777 or internet above.

Sylvan Sport GO

www.sylvansport.com

Photos:

1.     Gone Fishin’

2.     Hominy Makin’

3.     Cashiers resident, Hugh Dargan checks out broom corn

4.     Molasses makin’

5.     The author on the GO

6.     The GO at Smokemont

Adding color to the crossroads this summer, art flags expressed a unique love of our village. Created by twelve local artists, the art flags adorned the new pathway thru the Village Green and were sited at entrances into the park.

Today, October 6, they come down until next summer brings a flock of new images to our village. CASHIERS 2010 Art Flags will be for sale at the Leaf Festival this weekend and displayed in Harmony Tower. The artists donated their work. It is hoped that the program will be a success thru sales of the flags to provide for installation and a stipend to artists in coming years.

The program was underwritten by Hugh and Mary Palmer Dargan , residents of High Hampton, who were encouraged by the success of art flags in Easton, Maryland. “Peggy Connor, a fellow board member of the Village Green, frequently visits Easton for their plein air art event where many art flags are painted by local artists not participating in the juried event. The community later sells the flags to help fund projects. It seemed like a natural fit with our inaugural Arts on the Green event this July, to showcase our local artists,” says Ms. Dargan, inaugural chair of the event.

And what artists they are! The only requirement was that “CASHIERS 2010” appear somewhere on the canvas and exhibit, in acrylic paint, the wonders of our valley.

The White Squirrel and Country Road in Fall, located next to the Village Green Commons building, was painted by the Paintin’ Place. This is a private studio I shared by twelve women who pursue their “art with a heavy dose of laughter and friendship”.

Shari Erickson, a well know artist with national credits and Ringling School if Art training, created the iconic view of Whiteside Mountain located at the entrance of the music lawn. Her mastery of the mountain image is complimented by a musician in a cowboy hat on the reverse side.

Eli Corbin, resident of Asheville and Lonesome Valley, captured flags with the theme of Lady in Plein Air. She chose an artist painting and coupled it with a painters palette and art tubes as a strong graphic.

Kim Gruelle, Cashiers local and Ringling School trained graphic artist, of Raggety Ann and Andy heritage, provided two different renditions of our mountains. These atmospheric images, painted in summer landscape colors, ornamented the Post Office entrance to the Village Green all summer.

High Hampton is rich with artists with eight residents contributed art flags. The following three hung at the crossroads all summer:

Fred Grace, an architect from Baton Rouge was inspired by two local barns and reproduced them in rural surroundings using purple and yellow in the graphic theme. Mary Grace and Susan Reeder, offered a mother daughter duo and painted their pet, Oscar in Hydrangeas and Chipmunk on Bird Feeder. Jo Lane Edwards and Puddin Bankston collaborated with Bear on Branch by Jo Lane and Sunflowers by Puddin.

Carroll Rivers, award-winning artist in residence and instructor at High Hampton also from Charleston, SC, painted the flag that hung at the entrance of the Village Commons. Daylilies in Orange and Blue Sunrise are masterpieces of local images.

Ann Strub, New Orleans native and award winning artist, provided a fanciful pair of graphics to adorn the Village Play entrance. Apples and Two Children with Flowers, have a muted background that enhances the stylistic images. Mary Palmer Dargan experimented with thoughts from her garden, Snake Fencing with Iris and Garden Party.

The ten art flags are 30”x 40” and made by the provider for Easton’s event to ensure weatherproof fabric with professional installation sleeves. Unpainted, they cost about $100 to install. The posts honor the vernacular mountain flavor of Cashiers. Black locust was chosen and hanging armature created from two pieces of rusted rebar bent and drilled into the posts. Aptcon Construction installed the 8’ posts, which were placed around the Village Green campus by Wesley Wofford and Ms. Dargan.

The Village Green Board of Directors voted to keep three flags as part of the inaugural collection and place them on display in the Harmony Tower at the Village Green Commons. Eli Corbin, Shari Erickson and the Paintin’ Place are the three flags to be awarded this honor in 2010.

Please contact 828-743-3434 or www. villagegreencashiersnc.com for further information.

Valuable galleries from the musty halls of my teaching website are free for your landscape design edification! 4800 images from 40 slide shows with topics of landscape design, planting design, construction and landscape history are yours at www.dargan.com.

I am in a consolidation phase and am no longer teaching this exact material as a course, so wanted to share it with you. The course was enormously popular and critically acclaimed, produced graduates in several states. CCALD lasted until spring 2008, when Timeless Landscape Design: The Four Part Master Plan was published. Timeless represents the first 7 chapters of this course.

To wit:

Birth of a Landscape Design Certificate

My first blog entry :  Tues, May 23, 2003

How in the world can I condense an overview of a typical five year program in landscape architecture into a certificate course in landscape design that would be of lasting benefit to homeowners, builders, architects, garden center staff and landscape contractors? (

Since this is a blog, a web diary, let me first say that you are invited to witness a birth process! That topic is a pretty tall order…but ya’ know, I think I can handle it and make it fun. I’ll look at issues unique to personalized land expression and make a list of courses that will be immediately useful. Simple…HA!

My mission is to provide a spatial vocabulary that opens up the eyes of participants to a whole new way of looking at their world. Whew.

This process ought to put me back in the armchair of the layman as designer. A birth process. It is very easy after practicing as a landscape architect for over 20 years to forget how hard it is for the regular guy/gal to express “needs and wants, goals and dreams” in a cogent, effective and buildable fashion to others.

And, I really want to empower the regular guy/gal with the ability to create a perfectly fabulous home environment. lt takes a dose of classical training and practical input from the professor to begin to have the scales fall from a layman’s eyes. That’s the fun of it for me…to see the ah-ha experience of participants.

I have a hunch that the real benefit of this course will occur when it becomes a Distance Education item. Then the certificate candidate can hear my voice and see the photos. It is much richer with a narrative…perhaps going platinum in the world “how-to and why”?

As I write this, the pilot course is almost finished. 5 will graduate in mid-June of 2003. The camaraderie is phenomenal and that single thing so enriches my life. Everything is happening as I’d hoped, with a few surprises. For instance…3 of the grads are women who are married to, or are daughters of, doctors and each owns her own tractors (with attachments) received as a gift or as a necessity in order to personally express design ideas on their land….or to simply mow.

Other surprises.. I realized the .ppt images were so very valuable and impossible to retain unless captured as digitals or on paper.  (So…my adorable ex-pat, geek-guru younger brother, Christopher, graciously agreed to help post the lectures on the internet…I think this project is a hobby of his…Wow. That was big. Then I had to learn how to do it.

Chris provided the space and encouragement and it worked! Then it had to be secured. So I learned how to do that. Then I started the next embryonic course in Cashiers, NC that needed digital expression and intercommunication…  (This resulted in a 3 day charrette between Lachko, Chris and me (he is in Bulgaria) to set up the new site in time for the press review of the course in the Cashiers Crossroads Chronical and The Highlander. He is so modest…I wrote ” You are a genius. It is beautiful and so elegantly sophisticated and friendly.” He wrote back…” Naaaaw, the tools just keep getting better”.

Ya’ know, don’t you just love him!  The other issue is promotion. Its one thing to create lots of wonderful courses consisting of six lectures each. It is entirely another thing to get this information to the public.

I hope the tom-toms keep beating, for within 3 weeks of getting approval from my Department Head at Clemson, Dan Nadenicek, to launch the course this spring, it was offered as a free seminar. We put up posters and were honored by Master Gardener e-mail being fowarded to the right people by Professor Mary Beverly Haque. Then it got a spot on public radio with “Speaking of Schools” that ran several times. And the Greenville Foothills Garden Club (GCA) invited me to do a quick announcement at their joint meeting.

Anyway, I am eternally grateful for all the support.   (This course is meeting a unique need. My current students, who range from 29 to mid-60 s are all so helpful and suggest ways to make the experience even richer. I just love them. They are Master Gardeners, landscape contractors, architects, real estate developers, laymen and garden center staff. A wonderful mix.

So now I have a blog. (10-15-10 My brother told me later that I was blogging before blogging was invented!)

It is a personal account of how an idea became a reality. It should an interesting ride.

The Village Green Board invited everyone to join in the fun this weekend by creating an event that pleased both seasonal and permanent residents. Whole families came with baby carriages and bicycles, grandparents with walkers, disinterested teenagers who soon became animated and honeymooners who cooed. The entire village of Cashiers visited the Village Green and christened The Village Commons (former Summit Charter School site).

Ahh, Seattle, speaking of being entertained in style! The Northwest Perennial Alliance Hardy Pant Study Weekend was an information packed blast June 12-15. http://www.northwestperennialalliance.org/ As a measure of its delights, the conference annually sells out in mid- March. One of my plant breeding heros, Adrian Bloom, of England’s Blooms of Bressingham, pointed out that while hundreds of new cultivars are released each year, breaking into the market with a new plant is quite difficult and horribly expensive. I personally trial several of their achillleas & silenes. Other speakers included ME (!), Ros Creasy, Joe Eck, Wayne Winterrowd, Charles Price, Glenn Withey, Nicholas Staddon, Steve Lorton, and weekend moderator Riz Reyes. Learn more about our speaker is a great link to these talented lecturers. The tours, hosted by Tina Dixon and Paul Stredwick, plant market, workshops and parties brought out more than 450 people to the conference. I sold lots of Timeless Landscape Design: The Four Part Master Plan books!