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Dargan Landscape Architects Shares Tips for Four Season Gardens and Lessons from the Field

If you haven’t registered to receive Dargan Landscape Architects’ Landscape Your Life ezine, you’re missing out on some great information! Our ezines are filled with great landscape design inspiration and tips, videos from the field, our latest events and appearances and more. Here’s a look at what we shared in our latest ezine!

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Dargan Landscape Architects

Tips for a Four Season Garden
Much like woodland creatures, we tend to let our gardens hibernate in the winter and early spring. However, gardens are meant to entertain us all year long! At the 1st Camellia & Garden Symposium a few weeks ago, Mary Palmer and Hugh gave the keynote lecture sharing planting design ideas, camellia underplantings, edgings and two case studies, as well as how camellias can be used to enhance our landscapes all year long for a true four season garden.

Lessons From the Field
In another video, we show how Mary Palmer and Hugh tag teamed to transform what was best described as a “Sticky Widget” of a landscape into a lush, gorgeous landscape. With our clients’ vision in place, Hugh began work on the bare bones of the landscape, while Mary Palmer later added the embellishments to the family home landscape.

Fertile Thoughts?
With spring right around the corner, there’s no better time to make plans to turn your landscape design dreams into a reality. Think about where your landscape and home environment are now and where you’d like for it to be this year, and then contact us online or at 404-231-3889 for a free worksheet and a complementary garden design consultation.

For more landscape design tips, ideas and information, be sure to check out our blog. Also, register your email address with Landscape Your Life to receive our ezines, as well as free worksheets and webinars covering a variety of topics to help you create a healthy and vibrant landscape you and your family can enjoy!

The Approach & Arrival Sequence: Dignity & Expectation

There are four main components to a timeless landscape design, one that speaks to us with unmistakable beauty for ages to come. The first piece of this puzzle is “the approach and arrival sequence.” This is what we call the area between the street and the front door. When thoughtfully designed, it can provide a lasting first impression while setting the tone with curb appeal that expresses personality and sophisticated style.

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Dargan Landscape Architects

Whether it’s a stately mansion, an expansive rural estate or a smaller urban property, the approach and arrival sequence should be designed to play on the human emotions. The aesthetic perspective of landscape forms and textures and the manner in which the driveway ribbons to the house should evoke anticipation, expectation and excitement. Landscapers, builders and architects have been creating these emotional experiences for centuries. Many nineteenth century English novels paint descriptive scenes of the emotions heroines felt while riding their carriages up a winding driveway and catching glimpses of grandeur estates amidst rolling hills, trees and shrubs.

Unfortunately, this area is not getting the design attention it deserves on many of today’s residential sites. As many homeowners direct a great amount of time and energy into the outdoor living areas where they want to relax and entertain, the front yard and entryway can be left neglected. The drive portal and corridor, the parking court and the entry node may serve very practical functions, but this doesn’t mean they should not be meticulously designed to create relationships between shapes, textures, colors and heights.

This area should be the quintessence of the perfect collaboration of owner, builder, architect and landscape architect. The ultimate goal should be to achieve a harmonious blending and balancing of elements in order to exude refined tastes and dignity.

Here at Dargan Landscape Architects, we create custom designs that tell stories and express the personal style of our clients while letting nature speak. When every design element is approached with precision and care and imbued with purpose, the landscape becomes a beautiful experience for us and a healer for the earth.

Ways Your Landscape can Reduce Stress

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Dargan Landscape Architects

Stress is detrimental to our health and well-being, which is why it’s important that we work toward reducing stress and reversing its effects by treating the “inner self.” One way to take care of our inner self and support our immune and digestive systems, which are also negatively impacted by processed foods and environmental toxins, is to spend time in nature. By creating a garden environment that provides a space for relaxation and rejuvenation, you can reduce stress and enjoy a multitude of health benefits.

Whether it’s a work deadline or a trying relationship, daily stressors raise the cortisol level in your blood resulting in a domino effect of issues that contribute to aging and, in turn, quality of life. But a calming environment such as a garden can help you to relax, lower your blood pressure and reduce the cortisol level in your blood.

Spending time in a beautiful natural environment also activates your senses and releases Endorphins in your body. These feel-good hormones have the power to reduce the need for medications that alleviate pain and other ailments.

A vegetable garden will not only give you organic produce but a chance to intimately connect with nature. CNN recently reported on a new study that suggests gardening as one of the most effective leisure activities for relaxing and relieving stress. In addition to being a great gentle exercise, “The sensory experience of gardening ‘allows people to connect to this primal state,'” as founder and executive director of Urban GreenWorks, James Jiler, told CNN.

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Dargan Landscape Architects

But even if you aren’t a gardener, a landscape that allows you to interact with nature can still be significantly beneficial to your mental and physical health. Your landscape, for instance, could have lush pathways that allow you to brush up against plants or a bird feeder that allows you to observe animals in nature. 

Better yet, your landscape can be designed to include a sauna or spa that is not only luxurious but advantageous to your mental health.

Dargan Landscape Architects can help you transform landscapes to become a stress-busting havens for relaxation, health and well-being. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you create a stress-free zone on your property. Or learn more about how to turn your yard into a relaxing oasis through our PlaceMakers system, or through Mary Palmer’s book, Lifelong Landscape Design.

Join Mary Palmer Dargan on January 15 at Bellingrath Gardens

We’re pleased to share that Mary Palmer will be lecturing at Bellingrath Home and Gardens on January 15, 2014. We invite you to join us for this “Super Wednesday” program – a part of Bellingrath Gardens and Home’s Winter Wednesdays series – to learn how to get your garden ready for spring!

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Mary Palmer will be lecturing at the beautiful Bellingrath Gardens and Home on January 15.
Source: Facebook.com/bellingrath

During the lecture, Mary Palmer will share easy problem-solving and landscape design tips that will help you solve your most pesky landscape and garden issues during both morning and afternoon sessions. Participants are encouraged to bring along a picture or drawing of their landscape issues, so Mary Palmer can provide suggestions and advice.

Lunch will be included with the cost of the event, in addition to these informative sessions. Mary Palmer will also be selling and autographing copies of “Lifelong Landscape Design: Environments for Health and Longevity.”

We look forward to a great session on January 15, and we hope you’ll be able to join us from 10:30 to 2 pm. Invite a friend to come along and learn with you, and be sure to stick around and explore all the gorgeous gardens among Bellingrath’s 65-acres of blooms. Reservations are required for this event, so call 251-973-2217 extension 110 to save your spot. The reservation fee is $10 for Bellingrath members and $20 for non-members.

For more information on Dargan Landscape Architects’ events and appearances, or if you’re interested in learning more about our services, please visit our website. We’d love to meet with you – virtually or in person – to discuss your landscape’s needs and how we can help you create a master plan or tune-up to transform your space into an energized, nourishing and stress-free living space.

Also, don’t forget about our first holiday sale, happening now through December 18! Check out our special offerings that make perfect gifts for the gardener on your list.

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!