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mary palmer dargan

018. Parking Areas Demystified (2/8): Eight Tips to Immediately Improve Your Property

March 7, 2018

018Landscape Your Life, Design Your Environment & Nourish Your Soul.

PS: Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe now to Timeless Landscape Design. iTunes | Android | Stitcher | TuneIn | Google Play

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018. Parking Areas DeMystified (Part 2/8) Eight Tips for Immediately Improving Your Property

Hello Out There. I’m all about designing your property to make it seemlessly stressfree,  functional and beautiful! Enjoy this free 8-part course on Eight Tips for Immediately Improving Your Property :  (Parts 1-2) The Approach & Arrival Sequence, ( Parts 3) The Hub of the House,  (Parts 4-5) Designing Perimeter Spaces, (Parts 6-7) Destinations and Linkages, (Part 8) Art Elements & Design Principles

Why Design?  : Plan ahead, budget, conserve energy & money, maximize your space and enhance your property value! 

Facts: The Four Part Master Plan features useful tools for designing your property…these 8 segments share useful design tips within each of these four parts. This podcast series is a labor of love for me, and sometimes finding a quiet place to record is very difficult. So bear with the quality of this 8 part series…it was recorded on a lengthy lecture tour…in my car!

Enjoy learning about design! You don’t need a masters degree to design your property. 

 Topics in this episode:

. The pot ear as entry motif at driveway 
 
. Types of walkways and stepping stone paths, widths of paths
 
. The front landing, useful sizes for admiring your front door as a guest 

NOTE: Timeless Landscape Design: The Four Part Master Plan is available from me…[email protected] or by calling 828-743-0307.

VISUALS:

Please enjoy the gallery of gardens on our website! https://dargan.com

Cheers, 

Hugh & Mary Palmer Dargan, aslas

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What is Timeless Landscape Design : The Garden Talk Salon? 

AKA juicy nuggets of garden design brought to you by a think-tank of horticulturists, floral designers, sculptors and designers.

Welcome to The Garden Talk Salon! This is Mary Palmer Dargan and I’m mixin’ up recipes to landscape your life. After a long day of work, I need the garden to nourish my mind, body and soul. How’s yours workin’ for ya’?  Let’s design your landscape to fit your lifestyle like a glove.

Enjoy Chirps from the Field, our version of show notes, which are loaded with models for visual learners…after all, the spoken word can do just so much!

Share with a friend.  May we enjoy many a good garden adventure together. 

Who?

Hugh and I are licensed landscape architects who migrated in 1997 to Cashiers in the western North Carolina mountains. Hugh Dargan & I purchased Dovecote in 2012 as our landscape architectural offices. For 2 decades, we’d created gardens at Highcote in High Hampton, now featured in our health care garden design primer, Lifelong Landscape Design and written the best-selling landscape design book, Timeless Landscape Design : The Four Part Master Plan.

LIttle Dovecote needed everything.  Forget it serving as our office HQ; we enjoyed this historic 1929 farmhouse so much that it became our permanent home.  The best part about Dovecote is its context: the quaint, small and historic domestic structure, unused barn, future sculpture meadow and woodland path to the lake. 

Where? 

Many of our podcasts are live events. Each summer season, we host Friday lectures at Dovecote Gardens, our organic teaching gardens. Contemporary Stonehenge is now in the meadow and features atmospheric stone sculptures by artist, Carl Peverall. 

On Friday mornings, 10 am-noon, from Mothers Day to Labor Day, we hold The Garden Talk Salon. The brightest and most informed experts appear and share their stories about plants, design, cooking or nature.  

Find Dovecote at 35 Flash Point Drive (aka McKinney Way), Cashiers, NC 28717.

What’s in it for you ?

Your home environment can fit your lifestyle like a glove.

My lifelong mission is to “Heal The Earth One Garden at a Time”.

Now is the time to take your garden to school.

Don’t miss the inaugural episodes of Taming Tricky Places: Timeless Landscape Design. Our first 3 podcasts introduce why a master plan is important, and better yet, how to create one in 4 parts that will make your home environment fit your lifestyle like a glove.

This is visual learning at its best. 

A bonus awaits of videos with useful action steps. and Live Garden Talk Salons (GTS) videos reduced by magic into smaller bits.

So these first three podcasts are hot off the press from Tricky Places, my next garden design book.

What else is in store ?

. Timeless Landscape Design guides everything we do at Dovecote. You’ll take home useful action steps to improve and organize your own home environment.

. Lifelong Landscape Design: Environments for Health & Longevity peppers its concepts to keep the podcast pace lively. Action steps are provided to transform your home environment into an oasis of health, healing and inspiration. 

 . Interviews with my favorite healthy garden gurus await you. They often introduce one of our courses.

. Free courses to dip in – or binge thru- as you wish. 

Be sure to subscribe and not miss an episode of The Garden Talk Salon!

 

Cheers, 

Hugh & Mary Palmer Dargan, aslas

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Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: driveway design, mary palmer dargan, timeless landscape desig

Starting on Tricky Places : Gardens that Fit Your Lifestyle like a Glove.

December 31, 2016

rice-14-blogWhew. Its taken a summer like 2016 when friends and family had calamities, passed away or got really sick to make me appreciate my garden and health even more… and then the specter of scary local fires burning thousands of acres in our treasured Smoky Mountains which made me appreciate our fragile ecosystem.

This blog is a personal note is to myself to review everything in Dargan Landscape Architects book of work to help my friends, their home environments and interface with nature. Like holding hands with fragile yet resilient gloves that fit perfectly.

Hugh and I have been in practice as landscape architects for over four decades. Our client’s now lovely landscapes were tricky places to make behave: with thin soils, complicated topography, owners large wish list, zoning issues, too much or too little shade, too much or too little water, not enough space, too vast a canvas, weird parking, insufficient walkways…the list goes on!  We are blessed with the honor to coax, bend and collaborate with the owners to get the best designs built, and we thank them for sharing their private worlds.

My goal is to inspire homeowners to get the best out of their precious home environment. Design it to yield healthy wellbeing, inspire you to be your best and to provide nurturing spaces. Once we finish this work together, your garden will function like a well-oiled machine, which in itself is a stress-reducing factor.

Photographer, Sarah Valentine of Highlands NC,  shot beautiful dawn shots and late summer portraits of many of our local gardens.

Stay tuned as the book progresses!

Filed Under: Appearances, Lectures and Shows, Atlanta Garden Landscape Projects, Bloom Where you are Planted, Climate Change, Dovecote, Dovecote Garden Talk Salons, Fairy Gardens, General Landscape Commentary, Horticulture, Instagram, Landscape Architecture Projects, Landscape Design Tips, Mary's Events, Organic Gardening, PlaceMakers, Poppy's Environmental Tips, Poppy's Horticultural Tips, Poppy's Project, Uncategorized, Videos Tagged With: garden design, mary palmer dargan, sarah valentine photographer

Jeff Zahner’s Collection of Edible Shrubs & trees videos and list

May 30, 2016

Boy, oh boy!  Did we have a grand kick-off for our Garden Talk Salon 2016: Nature’s Kitchen.

Jeff Zahner shared his first choices with this list, all great for western North Carolina. Enjoy his take on paw paw (Asimina triloba) , blueberries (Vaccinium) , apples, lindera (Allspice), brambles and elderberry (Sambucus) plants.

Like this stuff?????  Please join us on Friday June 3rd for “Foraging and Processing GREENS” at Dovecote, 10 am. Please email me or call 828-743-0307. 

Please click on videos to watch! 

Jeff Zahner Part 1 shrubs edible 5-27-16

Jeff Zahner Part 2 trees 5-27-16

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: blueberries, cashiers nc, Chattooga Gardens, dargan landscape architects, edibles, foraging, Garden Talk Salon, jeff zahner, mary palmer dargan, pawpaw, spicebush

The Last Cherry Hazelnut Bitters Ship Dec 17!

November 23, 2015

Pondering a gift for that special someone? 

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My homemade bitters are fresh from the field! Aged at Dovecote for 12 weeks in little charcoal barrels. Only a few boxes of Cherry Hazelnut paired with Elderberry Apple remain from our winter bottling.

Available till Thursday, Dec 17 for Christmas Delivery to your list.

Please watch video for particulars!  ) … and opps, about the my head cut off video aspect thing! 

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bitters packaged

 

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Gift wrapped and sent to your friends.

Just click the BUY NOW button.

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MP Pr headshot elderberry bestHugh and I go out early mornings in the late summer to collect the elderberries and green apples from the marshy area in the pasture next to Dovecote.


Then we soak them in spirits and add specially chosen ingredients like huckleberry vodka, dandelion root, wild cherry bark and elderberry syrup. They steep for about 8-10 weeks. Then I finish them in the little charred oak kegs for 2-3 more weeks.

These bitters are delicious on their own or in a cocktail.

While supplies last ’til Thursday, December 17.

Cheers,

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Mary Palmer

personalized message



Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bitters, cashiers nc, Dovecote, mary palmer dargan

Dovecote’s LEAF FESTIVAL in High Gear… A Beautiful Weekend!

October 10, 2015

The Village Green hosts the LEAF Festival each year at peak viewing time. Fall color is already popping and the sun is shining and birds singing…well, you get the picture. Come join us at The Village Green in Cashiers, NC and take in a stroll around 12 acres of merchants, music and yummy treats.

I just filmed our booth opening this am, please enjoy!

https://www.facebook.com/dovecotegarden    or here!

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Am debuting our elderberry & cherry hazelnut bitters today.

A 10% discount for friends who read this blog and visit our little shop.

 

 

All the best,

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Mary Palmer

Filed Under: Uncategorized, Videos Tagged With: cashiers leaf festival, Dovecote Porch and Gardens, mary palmer dargan, the village green

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