Dargan Landscape Architects

Create Nourishing Flourishing Home Utopias

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The Landscape Your Life Winter Sale is Here!

We’re pleased to announce the very first Landscape Your Life holiday sale, the “Holiday Gardeners Need Love in the Winter, too!” sale. Starting today and continuing for the next week, we invite you to participate in this special sale.

We’ve been listening to our community of landscape design enthusiasts and have created this sale to help address the questions and topics you want answered. We also want to help make holiday shopping a breeze for those tough nuts to crack on your shopping list! Santa’s Helper (aka Mary Palmer) has packed the garden shopping cart with goodies for you to look through, so your garden and landscape design dreams don’t mold and mildew this winter!

Our first featured package is the Holiday Book Bundle. This bundle features three classic landscape design books – Timeless Landscape Design, Lifelong Landscape Design, and The Early English Kitchen Garden. Each book is filled with great information and inspiration, including Mary Palmer’s secret tips for garden-designing homeowners and landscape designers, as well as tons of gorgeous photos. In addition to garden enthusiasts, this makes a great gift for those who enjoy armchair reading. To make this bundle even sweeter, each book is autographed by Mary Palmer and beautifully wrapped!

Dargan Landscape Architects winter sale
Holiday Book Bundle

Our second special package features SPROUT in PLACE: PlaceMakers™ Virtual Blueprint System. Through the very same system Mary Palmer uses to transform hundreds of ordinary landscapes into slivers of paradise, you’ll learn that it’s possible to achieve a beautiful and functional property. This is the perfect gift for anyone looking to maximize their investment and improve their property, as well as landscape designers interested in putting themselves “over the top as an expert in your field.”

landscape your life winter holiday sale
SPROUT in PLACE: PlaceMakers™ Virtual Blueprint System

Head over to our website today for more information on our first holiday sale. Holiday gardeners need love in the winter too, and this is the perfect way to show them some love this holiday season!

Happy holidays from Dargan Landscape Architects!

Essential Design Principles of Timeless Landscape Design – Part 2

As we previously shared, there are several design principles that must be taken into consideration in order to develop a timeless landscape. In the first part of this series, we covered axial relationships;  focalization; symmetry and asymmetry; and repetition and rhythm. Today, we’ll continue our discussion on the principles of landscape design by taking a look at light and shadow; proportion and scale; and reflection.

Light and shadow, like color, often establish certain feelings or emotions within a landscape. Oftentimes, these can occur naturally, such as light filtering through the leaves and onto a garden floor in a pattern that is ever changing. Playing with light and shadow is a great way to create a serene and peaceful area one can retreat to at the end of a day.

light and shadow

In residential landscape design, proportion is used to develop “harmonious spatial relationships between the parts of a design and the whole.” More simply put, proportion is what helps create cohesiveness within the landscape. Scale refers to the size of certain elements in the landscape in relation to where it’s been placed. Sometimes we notice that elements of a landscape have been under-scaled – meaning objects are too small for their surroundings – or that they are out of scale, or too big for the area. Choosing appropriately-scaled elements for a landscape is essential in creating a balanced space.

proportion and scale

Reflective qualities add so much to a landscape’s character and can also be used to set the area’s mood, bringing depth, mystery and drama to the space. The reflection of light in a landscape, especially when it’s reflected across water, instantly attracts the eye and adds life not only to the landscape, but the entire property as well.

reflection

The design principles of axial relationships; focalization; symmetry and asymmetry; repetition and rhythm; light and shadow; proportion and scale; and reflection are all necessary to create a timeless landscape design to enjoy for years to come. Contact Dargan Landscape Architects today to learn how we can help you develop a master plan or a tune-up for your property. We work with clients in all locations and can meet with you in person or virtually to discuss your needs and start planning your landscape’s new look.

For more information on creating a timeless landscape and to see further examples of these design principles at work, take a look at Mary Palmer’s book, Timeless Landscape Design.

Help Us Design Dovecote’s New Garden!

The participants in our Summer Sizzle. Summer Pop! 3 day Garden Design event June 16-19 will design our new garden with us. I think Hugh and I might need some garden psychoanalysis…or at least a drink in the shade!

The front garden was installed last week in less than 2 days; so now is the time to tackle the rear.

If you’ve been watching this project unfold, now comes the juicy part.

Dovecote

Sound intriguing? Here is a sneak preview…

We have a blank canvas with 19 existing boxwoods, wooden fencing and a hedge backdrop 18’ tall. A BLANK CANVAS.

We’ll take you by the hand and show you how to analyze the space to get maximum benefit… beauty and brains.

Blank Canvas

Ever wonder how to start to design your own garden?

Help us solve pesky questions like where to hide the compost center consisting of the comfrey tea maker, the tumbler plus 4 leaf decomposers. Then there is the potting shed, the water garden, several pieces of statuary and kitchen garden. How are we going to manage water harvesting? Did I mention the 8 tile pictures of birds left over from a Southern Accents show house?

Interested? Sign up now for one of the few remaining spaces!

The pre-event design studio June 15 still has a few spaces left and will help you solve those pesky problems on your property. Available only to course participants.

So sign up now to save your seat!

 

Hydrangea…heaven???

 At our friends, Ruthie and Berryman Edward’s garden walk Annabelle’s steal the show. We designed it two years ago and are delighted with the beautiful hydrangea and hosta display very early this summer….3 weeks early. Annabelle, Bella Anna, Tardiva ( just starting) and Endless summer are all in a cacophony of WHITE and blue. The weird thing is that the internodal stretch on the tardivas has created very elongated  nodes, some 6″ apart..not at all normal. This means the limbs will fall out from the weight of the flower heads. It will be 90 here on Saturday. We’ve had heat early, lots of rain and voila! Corset anyone??

The Right Way to Anchor Gate Hinges

I often get asked how to anchor a gate into a column…and here you see it!

Concrete blocks poured solid, a 6″ metal column in the center with welded gate flanges of 4 wide” metal protrude past the future veneered by at least 3″ to enable a good connection to the future hinges.

This work was done by Paul Milsap and Wayne Anders under the direction of Scott Wendendorff of Chiquipin Builders in Cashiers, NC at the Forehand residence in Cullasaja.