Lifelong Landscape Design - TribPapers
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Lifelong Landscape Design

Lifelong Landscape Design

Asheville – Lifelong landscape design means thinking about more than your garden. It involves encouraging your community to be a well-rooted environment consisting of friends who share home-grown produce, walk in the neighborhood, recycle, water harvest, compost and are watchful of each other’s well-being.

Dargan Landscape Design lets you design your utopia –

“We’ve been in this business for over 45 years and have vast resources at our fingertips to transform your property, says Mary Palmer Dargan. We listen to your needs like a physician would to a patient.”

As vital members of your consulting team, Hugh and Mary Palmer Dargan work seamlessly with the team architect, engineer, landscape contractors and YOU, the owner, to bring the highest and best use of your property to the forefront.

“Then, we employ our proprietary PLACE system: to analyze the potentials, layers and agenda, create so you can enjoy the resultant environmental transformation.”

Lifelong landscape design means thinking about more than your garden. It involves encouraging your community to be a well-rooted environment consisting of friends who share home-grown produce, walk in the neighborhood, recycle, water harvest, compost and are watchful of each other’s well-being.

Timeless Landscape Design

A well-designed garden takes more than plants and flowers to consider it eye-catching. Hugh and Mary Palmer Dargan, ASLAs explore the depth of visual art in landscape design in their new book Timeless Landscape Design: The Four-Part Master Plan (Gibbs Smith, Publisher, $29.95, Hardcover, January). According to the outdoor design duo, the map to creating flawless landscapes lies in the unique four-part master plan and the skillful application of the art elements: line, color, form, and texture, as well as broader design principles such as proportion, scale, and focalization. Combined, these techniques are the groundwork for defining “timeless landscapes” — those that please the eye, nourish the soul and make living easier. Learn More about Timeless Landscape Design.

The Early English Kitchen Garden

Mysteries unfold as the birth and evolution of the English kitchen garden from 1580-1800 is traced with emphasis on the effects of geometric and picturesque landscape movements. This book, Mary Palmer Dargan’s Masters thesis, specifically addresses the origins of the kitchen garden, records changes in its structure and function and explains why these changes occurred.

Social attitudes toward the kitchen garden changed as the landscape movements influenced the way people perceived their relationship to their environment. This resulted in the alteration of its physical structure which consists of five elements: method of enclosure, layout of beds, external form, location and relationship to the rest of the property. This thesis evaluates the medieval hortus as the forerunner of the kitchen garden and the effects of the geometric and picturesque landscape movement s effects on this, the first garden of mankind. 

Primary research was conducted at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. and focused on the period English garden texts in the rare book collection. Of value to persons interested in gardens and garden history, this study is of particular use to those in the fields of landscape architecture, historic preservation, history, horticulture and geography. Because it traces the origins and evolution of the kitchen garden during a particular time in history, more research is needed to complete the evolutionary picture of the kitchen garden. 

The Placemakers Academy – Garden Design Course

Do you want to take your garden to the next level, but you don’t know where to start? Do you have dreams of a home garden that enriches you and your lifestyle, but you don’t know which plant to put where, how to make a design that flows, or how to get the help you need to get it all done?  Mary Palmer Dargan’s 45 plus years as a botanist and landscape architect have led to  tried and true methods, creating designs featured in Better Homes & Gardens, The New York Times, & on HGTV- the recipe that created award winning designs from coast to coast.

This garden design course is created with simplicity in mind. Even before crafting the course curriculum they surveyed 200 of you to understand your needs.  

Says Dargan, about the course, “We’ve been there. We know you’ve made mistakes in the past and need some encouragement to get started. Many of you are at a stand still, not knowing where to start and afraid to make costly mistakes. You’re confused about the ins and outs of botany, soil fertility, working with slopes and shade, and creating a low-maintenance design. Of course you struggled before, you probably didn’t have the guidance you needed to succeed, and this can be complex stuff. Creating living art across time and space is no small task- but you are a “Placemaker” at your core. Within you is the innate ability to be the architect of your own utopia. Only this time you have a road map, and we will get you to the finish line.”

To learn more about joining The Placemakers Academy 2020, go to www.theplacemakersacademy.com

Licensed, seasoned landscape architects, Hugh and Mary Palmer Dargan, ASLAs, enjoy creating custom master plans for living environments. Their designs for residential properties, museums, churches and campuses have received innumerable awards, print and TV media coverage.They live and work between Cashiers and Asheville, and enjoy giving lectures, when not working in the garden.

Excerpts of this article were taken from the architects’ website with permission.