Dargan Landscape Architects

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timeless landscape design

The Landscape Your Life Winter Sale Ends Tonight!

Are you still searching for the perfect holiday gift for your garden-loving family or friend? If so, you’ve still got some time to take advantage of Landscape Your Life’s first winter sale! Santa’s Helper, Mary Palmer, has packed the garden shopping cart with a few bundles to make your holiday shopping a breeze. Here’s a look at our special gift packages available through midnight tonight!

Our Holiday Book Bundle includes Timeless Landscape Design, Lifelong Landscape Design and The Early English Kitchen Garden, all autographed by Mary Palmer, beautifully wrapped and ready to go! These books are perfect for those in need of a good read over the winter as they dream and make plans for their spring gardens.

landscape design book bundles

landscape design holiday book bundle

landscape design holiday book bundle

Also featured in our winter sale is our home training study, SPROUT in PLACE. This legendary course begins in January and will help you achieve the garden of your dreams with a virtual blueprint system and 90 days of support included! This system has helped hundreds of homeowners transform their landscapes into beautiful and functional spaces they thought were impossible to create.

holiday special

Our holiday sale ends tonight at midnight! Act now to take advantage of this special holiday offer.

Also, don’t forget about Mary Palmer’s free gift for you this holiday season – a complimentary training video and worksheet that will help perk up your indoor environment with the crisp white color and refreshing scent of beautiful Narcissus.

And for additional free worksheets and videos covering sustainable landscape design topics that will help you improve your garden into a space created for health, longevity and fun, be sure to register your email address with us at www.landscapeyourlife.com. We’ll send these freebies right to your inbox, so keep an eye out for the current worksheet!

From the Dargan Landscape Architects family to yours, Happy Holidays!

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!

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!

A Stunning Landscape Transformation

Many of our projects here at Dargan Landscape Architects involve creating a master plan of on-going facets that work to transform a homeowner’s property into an oasis they’ll enjoy for many years to come. In other cases, a tune-up may be all that’s needed in order to breathe new life into a tired, dull landscape. Regardless, it’s always exciting to keep track of the progress of a project and take note of the stunning transformations that take place within each landscape!

Today, we want to give you a peek into our portfolio with a look at some before and after shots of one of our projects. Enjoy this peek of one truly amazing transformation!

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For clients whose property featured gorgeous views of the surrounding mountains, we designed a landscape that nicely framed its surroundings, while providing plenty of space for the homeowners to enjoy all year long. Grading work was required to level the area where the in-ground fire pit was installed.

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Once completed, this part of the landscape became a great spot for enjoying a camp fire with family and friends on a chilly day.

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The intersection of meandering pathways begins to take shape…

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… The end result is a gorgeous walkway with lots of greenery and a bird bath taking center stage, accented with a few pops of color.

Here are a few more photos of the final results of this project.

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dixon path view to mnts copy

dixon big view after copy

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Are you ready to transform your property with a new landscape? Contact Dargan Landscape Architects, so we can schedule a time to speak with you about the ideas you have in mind for your space. Either virtually or in person, we can help design the landscape you’ve always dreamed of. Let us help you begin your landscape’s stunning transformation.

Design Leaders Encourage Collaboration for Creation of Healthier Communities

Designing gardens that offer benefits to a homeowner’s overall health and well-being is an integral part of our work here at Dargan Landscape Architects. We attend events all across the country to participate in lectures on how homeowners can achieve landscapes that offer these health benefits. Because so much of our mission revolves around creating healthy spaces for individuals, we were especially thrilled to see leaders from major design organizations issuing a call for design professionals to focus on creating healthier communities at the recent 2013 ALSA Annual Meeting.

healthy landscape design
Design by Dargan Landscape Architects

Mickey Jacob, president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA); Tom Tavella, FASLA, president of the ASLA; and Bill Anderson, president of the American Planning Association (APA), all shared their feelings on how “working from the understanding that design can encourage active lifestyles and contribute to community health and quality of life” can help build healthier, more sustainable communities. The trio related this to climbing obesity rates and increasing health care costs. Tavella shared that design professionals can help reverse this trend by keeping design principles such as walkability and spaces that promote physical activity in mind.

Anderson further noted that the relationship between these professions of planning and landscape architecture originally came from better public health needs. With that in mind, he shared, it only makes sense that design professionals should come together once again to transform towns and cities across America “in order to make them healthier.”

garden design for health and longevity
Design by Dargan Landscape Architects

We’re encouraged to see the leaders of these major design associations, once again, emphasizing the importance of working toward making our communities healthier places to live!

If you’re interested in making your own home and garden a healthier place to live, contact us! Dargan Landscape Architects can help you create a master plan or tune-up that focuses on transforming your garden into an oasis of health and longevity. Give us a call at 404-231-3889 for more information, and be sure to sign up at www.landscapeyourlife.com to receive worksheets and videos containing tips that will help you make your garden a place that enhances your health!