Dargan Landscape Architects

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The Evergreen Cometh

With the holiday season upon us, evergreens are everywhere. I recently asked my Facebook friends to share with me their favorite evergreens for winter interest – short, round, tall, thin, slightly weepy, or perhaps one with slightly colored foliage. I’m curious to hear from my blog readers too. Which evergreen is your favorite?

plant_live_trees_chattooga_gardensRecently, I sauntered over to our friendly neighborhood, family-run garden center, Chattooga Gardens. While marvelling at the show-stopping, holiday boxwood wreaths created by Jodie Zahner, I saw Mr. Jeff Z sorting out a delivery of gorgeous, fresh, mint- condition evergreen trees.

Ahhh, my mouth watered watching them slide down the big box truck pulled by a chain attached to a bobcat. Out popped blue ones, green ones, grey ones and yellow ones.

With visions of sugar plums dancing in my head (shaped like conifers, of course), I immediately thought about the designs I could create with these beautiful trees.

Dovecote, our home in the mountains, needs an infusion of winter glamour! Does yours? If so, a carefully selected group of evergreens are the perfect choice.

Evergreens can be grand, soaring focal points (like deodora cedars), accents to your home composition (Nellie R. Stevens holly is a great anchor) or grouped (boxwoods come to mind) as a node. These bullet-proof, southern mainstays populate the region. But, these evergreens pale in comparison to what is available in zone 5… ahhhhh.

From the Korean Silverlock Spruce (pictured below) to Nordman Spruce, and Pyramidal Silver Fir to Blue Spruce, the list goes on and on! Austrian Pine, Weeping Norway Spruce, White Fir, Alaskan Blue Cedar, Boxwoods, Oriental Golden Spruce, Colorado fastigiata Spruce, Horstmann’s Silbe, Oriental Green Knight and Blue Korean Silveray, just to name a few! Each one offers its own unique beauty, color and texture to its environment.

I take photos of tags, since I really don’t know all these beautiful plants. (My cell phone is my notebook these days!)

This holiday season, I encourage you to treat yourself to a burst of glamour and invest in evergreens with runway style… and support your local, family-run nursery in the process.

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I know everyone is already busy with various aspects of the holiday season, so I want to help you out and save some of your precious time with my December ezine. Let’s continue to warm up your holiday season with evergreen gifts. Register your email address with us to receive my ezine right in your inbox!

And now, I wanted to share news from Mrs. Santa…

Be on the lookout Tuesday for the invitation to my “Green Thumbs Don’t Mold in the Winter” winter sale.  

Just 2 indispensable things… watch for the announcement next week!

Thank you for being my community of garden designing friends.

It’s heartwarming and an honor to be in your circle.

Happy Holidays from the Dargans!

Celebrity Guest, Author Louisa Cameron, Shares a Fun Courtyard Treatment that Solves Urban Dilemmas!

At our Charleston event this past weekend, our celebrity guest, Louisa Cameron, Charleston native who is an author of 2 books on Charleston gardens and wonderful garden designer, produced a model of a courtyard to solve the problems of an urban Bed and Breakfast for 8 Church Street, The Cabell House…now where will Mrs. Randy Cabell get those pink bushes?

Louisa was good enough to speak on her project on film for us!

A Courtyard Wedding in Charleston: YOUR Outdoor Room #6

We’re celebrating 40 years in landscape design!  Join us for a special garden design event in Charleston, SC…Come take YOUR garden to school!

Charleston, SC GardenWow. I didn’t know the value of an outdoor room until a client called with a wedding emergency early in my career. In Charleston, SC, a 18th c single house built for a family of four, had a set of rooms downstairs for business. Today, a family of two might comfortably squeeze into its narrow, one-room footprint. The classic single house, usually has a two story piazza, or balcony running alongside its long, attenuated body, but this one was strictly all building.

So, where to put the guests? The exquisite 2 tiered cake with elegant sugar petal flowers was okay in the foyer, but the dancing and merriment needed more elbow room.

Hugh and I eyed a  small garden patch, 18 x 15′ = approx 270 sq, ripe with potential. It was wildly overgrown with bushy breath of spring (Lonicera fragrantissima) occupying half the space. A hidden birdbath buried 6′ into its interior indicated this once was a small garden.

The rest of the patch was an L shape and surrounded by a tall, brick wall of mellow old brick and obscured by fig and ivy. We love fig vine for its greening effect, but this one now had knobby vines 2″ stems from decades of build-up.  Another foot of space gleaned form garden maintenance archaeology was ours!

Ragged indica azaleas and a very spindly, loquat with very messy fruit, occupied the rest of the space.

Spring cleaning came first. Once the onion was pealed, how to design for maximum use and beauty after the party was over? A circle space, outlined with a brick sailor edge, 12′ in diameter sodded with grass, created a tippy-toe spot for a garden tent with musicians. The dancing worked its way out to the parking court and the pathways.  A new courtyard garden where there was none, and now a PLACE to be.

3o years later, guess what is has become…a children’s play area, paved and ready for the next party!

The allure of the courtyard and outdoor rooms brings Charleston, SC immediately to mind.  Join us February 25-27, 2013 as we share the recipes for these timeless outdoor rooms.
In honor of Dargan Landscape Architects 40th Anniversary in 2013, Elements of Outdoor Rooms, harkens to our early design practice in Charleston, SC. Full time for decades and continuing on today, we’ve tested art elements & client needs on the canvas of this historic city. Dargan archives at the South Carolina Historical Society house hundreds of our courtyard and outdoor room designs, many of which exist today and hold lifestyle tools useful to properties anywhere.

Design Principles to Enliven (continued) : YOUR Outdoor Room #5

We’re celebrating 40 years in landscape design!  Join us for a special garden design event in Charleston, SC…Come take YOUR garden to school!

The Design Principles : #6 Light and Shadow ,  #7  Proportion and Scale & #8 Reflection

Charleston, SC Garden6. Light and Shadow. Going along with color, light and shadow playing off one another has its own emotive language. Dappled light filtering onto a lawn or forest floor creates an ever-changing wash of patterns. An environment like this releases you from prosaic thoughts and evokes a feeling of serenity and inspiration. The animated light quality reduces the feeling of enclosure and encourages peaceful thought.

7. Proportion and Scale. Most of the western world’s greatest architectural achievements demonstrate a mastery of proportion (i.e., the relationship of parts to the whole). In architecture, proportion has been traditionally founded in the rigors of mathematics and geometry. This is why geniuses like Andrea Palladio in the Renaissance took the trouble to learn the numerical proportions of the Roman builders.

The more formal designs in landscape architecture also have their historical roots in classical proportions, although now they are rarely taught. For most landscape architects working on residential projects, determining proportion is largely a matter of sensing and intuiting, through training one’s eye, how to create harmonious spatial relationships between the parts of a design and the whole. If you study the most renowned sites and classic examples of architecture and landscape design, you will internalize a feeling for proportional relationships that look and feel right.

Scale relates a bit more to the size of elements in relationship to their context. Out of scale refers to an overly large object placed in a too-small setting. Under-scaled is a tiny object lost in an ocean of space like an acorn on a lawn. In general, we find that people tend to under-scale statuary and pots in relation to where they are being used. For those two categories of objects, we tend to advise, “When in doubt, select a more generous rather than a smaller size.” This is especially true of pots.

8. Reflection. When there is a possibility of using it, reflection adds depth and a sense of mystery to a scene. The reflection of light across water draws the eye and makes a space lively in the sunshine and soothing in the evening. Trees beside a pool seem taller and assume more importance. The effect of color is doubled.

The creative use of the tools of visual art lies in designing a visually stimulating landscape using the four art elements (line, color, form and texture) and the broader principles of design such as proportion, scale and focalization. By visiting notable landscapes, photographing, sketching and studying the plans, you will build a strong foundation for your design.

Join us in Charleston, February 25-27, 2013 as we share the recipes for these timeless outdoor rooms.
In honor of Dargan Landscape Architects 40th Anniversary in 2013, Elements of Outdoor Rooms, harkens to our early design practice in Charleston, SC. Full time for decades and continuing on today, we’ve tested art elements & client needs on the canvas of this historic city. Dargan archives at the South Carolina Historical Society house hundreds of our courtyard and outdoor room designs, many of which exist today and hold lifestyle tools useful to properties anywhere.

Design Principles to Enliven (cont) : YOUR Outdoor Room #4

We’re celebrating 40 years in landscape design!  Join us for a special garden design event in Charleston, SC…Come take YOUR garden to school!

The Principles of Design (continued) :  #3.  Symmetry and Asymmetry & #4  Repetition and Rhythm

Charleston, SC Garden3. Symmetry and Asymmetry. Chaos and order. Be it a house or landscape under construction, chaos results. Even the most ordered man-made landscape in picturesque or formal style goes through a learning curve involving earth moving and revegetation. A master landscape plan helps navigate the rough road to perfection. Look to Mother Nature for clues involving environmental concerns to make the ultimate landscape ordered by both man and natural processes.
In landscape design, symmetry refers to a method of placing shapes of equal volume, size or form on either side of a central point or along an axis. What is on the left side is mirrored on the right. Symmetrically placed forms add stability and balance.

The formal gardens of the geometric period in France in the seventeenth century were founded on symmetrical design. The picturesque English landscape gardens of the eighteenth century reacted against it and celebrated the naturalness of asymmetry. In contemporary residential landscape design, we often combine elements of symmetry and asymmetry in different parts of the master plan to achieve formality, informality or, as is often the case, a subtle blending of both.

4. Repetition and Rhythm. When a similar form is repeated at regular or irregular intervals, a certain rhythm results. Bouncing balls of boxwoods have delighted generations of gardeners and are probably one of the most vivid examples of repetition. When similar forms are organized in a single direction, the effect of rhythmic movement is even stronger.

The technique of repeating the same shape gives a landscape design a feeling of unity; the eye seems to like the echoing of a form, and we subconsciously join these elements together into a whole scene. The use of large, repeated forms, such as clipped cedars, takes a bit of conviction because its effect tends to dominate. When done well, few design treatments have more authority or sophistication.

Join us in Charleston, February 25-27, 2013 as we share the recipes for these timeless outdoor rooms.
In honor of Dargan Landscape Architects 40th Anniversary in 2013, Elements of Outdoor Rooms, harkens to our early design practice in Charleston, SC. Full time for decades and continuing on today, we’ve tested art elements & client needs on the canvas of this historic city. Dargan archives at the South Carolina Historical Society house hundreds of our courtyard and outdoor room designs, many of which exist today and hold lifestyle tools useful to properties anywhere.