OVERVIEW

In this captivating podcast episode, Angelique delves into the world of landscape architecture with the renowned Mary Palmer Dargan. With over 40 years of experience in the industry and numerous books under her belt, including the acclaimed Timeless Landscape Design, Mary brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the conversation.

As a professor, lecturer, and seasoned landscape architect, Mary has developed a comprehensive design course, The PlaceMakers Academy, aimed at elevating outdoor living spaces. The course covers a range of topics, including mapping, typography, elevational changes, and plant materials, and is suitable for landscapers who want to get into design, as well as young people and retirees who want to learn how to live in a home.

Listen, or read, more about Mary Palmer Dargan below.

TRANSCRIPT

Angelique 
Welcome to our first podcast and our first guest, Mary Palmer Dargan. Thank you so much, Mary Palmar, for being with us today.

Mary Palmer Dargan
I'm delighted to be here. I feel like thank you for the invitation.

Angelique
You are so welcome. Well, what I thought we would start with, is letting people know a little bit about your background, and what you've done in the industry, your landscape architect, but also, you know, had your own landscape architect company, as well as a lecturer or an author. And you're doing some pretty cool stuff now, too. Do you want to kick us off and give us some background?

Mary Palmer Dargan
I'll give you all a quick recap. I'm just a troublemaker when it comes to landscape design, and I've been a professor, I'm the author of three or four books, one of which was best selling called Timeless Landscape Design. And I have been involved in landscape architecture as a licensed professional for over 40 years. I'm married to a landscape architect named Hugh Dargan, who's retired for about 10 years. And we live in both Camden, South Carolina and catcher's North Carolina. And I've worked all over the country and in many places abroad. So I don't want to say I've seen it all. But I do consider it to be a big client psychology project, of all of all times, yeah. So I've learned the tricks of the trade. And there's always a new one to embrace. So you never stop learning about the field of the interaction between man and land. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have.

Angelique 
Okay, well, we first met you at our first event, Futurescape in 2022. And you've also attended our SYNKD Live event. And we're so glad to have you. And you're doing something to further other people's engagement with land. You want to tell us about the Placemakers Academy.

Mary Palmer Dargan
Thank you so much, actually, really, the reason why I got involved with y'all last year was not only did I want to embrace the idea of the interconnectivity between all the multiple disciplines, horticulture, installation, maintenance, design, build, that's a big picture. And nobody does that. And when I saw that you were doing the FutureScape And then this year SYNKD Live, I thought, Well, gosh, we are giving this course called The Placemakers Academy, to homeowners and designers who want to turn up their skills, so they'll understand how people live on the land, and how they can adapt it to meet their unique needs. I thought, well, this would be a good place to interact with with your fabulous events.

And I absolutely met the most amazing people saw new products just really have made friends that are from all over the southeast, really all over the country. And then this year, it just exceeded my wildest dreams. Lovely people were they're very interested, lots of homeowners came people in the industry. And so what we're doing with Placemakers Academy is a 10 module course that you can take at your own speed, and it's called an Evergreen course. But in the springtime, it has like 80 lectures, they're about five minutes each, but they are very well vetted. And there's a whole roadmap for your success. But every spring, we do an immersion course, and that is 14 to 16 weeks long. You have a week, a week in between each lecture, and you have homework.

We have a lot of adults that actually put pen to paper, they go in they they map their properties or properties of other people and bring it to the table as questions and we really try to help them like an extended design studio when I was a professor of landscape architecture at Clemson. In South Carolina, I loved it now taught design studios of eager beaver, undergraduates and graduate program. So it's really hard to get design studio training where someone can look at your work one on one, and help move you through the wormhole of creation. So I hope

Angelique
That's helpful. And we love what you're doing. And you brought a lot of enthusiasm to our event. And yeah, just great to have you and be connected. We're going to be showing case in some of your work in a future issue too. So that'll be fun.

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Mary Palmer Dargan
I practice with my husband who's a landscape architect. We were married four years ago. And we fell in love in a historic site in Natchez, Mississippi at a garden southern garden History Society meeting and we had a conversation that's never stopped about design. And it's been a wonderful thing. And now he's retired. So I'm running this business online by myself and have great staff.

So I've been in the industry in many different capacities as Professor as landscape architect, as lecturer, all around busy body. Anyway, I'm here with you and share, share the joy of trying to fit your landscape to fit to make it work for your lifestyle, like a glove is like tailoring a custom tailored outfit in your own property. And it helps bring you peace, joy, helps you reach your highest and best purpose in life, if you have a nice place of repose on your own property. And we can talk more about that as we go along.

Okay. Nashville, Tennessee, if you think my voice is twang-y, it is. I grew up like this. But I've studied extensively in England then all over the world. I mean, it's amazing how much my work and travels have taken me to study to figure out what makes gardens tick. Why do they work? What is the universal language of the land? And we've kind of mastered it and always learn something new every day. 

Angelique
That's what's so great about the industry, isn't it always something new and tailoring to sites, you know, every site is so different. Tell me a little bit about your design course. Because you said it's for millennials, or is it for who's your target audience for that?

Mary Palmer Dargan 
Well, it's really for anybody who wants to improve their lifestyle outside. It also helps you the bottom line was you get to sell your house someday, you probably figured out the problems that someone else will not want to buy your property over a different one because it has outdoor rooms, terraces, convenient places to park, it presents well from the road. It has a system of cohesiveness.

We teach with the basis of the four part Master Plan, which is the approach and arousal sequence, the hub of the house, the promoter spaces, and destinations. And once you do sort of this anatomy of your property, you can do it on paper, we do it on paper, it's really good way to learn how to draw, it's not a blaming, you don't have to be a brain surgeon to to design your prop.

We take it through everything from the wish list phase to the mapping phase to learning about how to manage elevational changes typography, how to choose your battles, make an action list. And then as you go through learning about plant materials, of course, it's very important that you tend to have to work with the land first and figure out what's going on underneath you know, like the mind of your your property, and then the body of the house. And then you put all that together, you get a spirit of place. That's one of my recipes. And then we you know, honor the environment.

You come out of the course with a good understanding of the environment where your north arrow points you in the spring, summer, winter and fall and helps you understand how your sun is circling your property to get you light at different times of the year. So it doesn't always rise right up there to your window and actually smoothing. And then how to figure out what zone you're in. So you'll be successful with your plants. It's a huge course. It consists of 10 modules, and then you end with a Master Plan. 

We're starting on our fifth course of students because the immersion course we do that in January through April, we just had our last class last Thursday, and they're all coming to graduation and garden tours and sharing their projects. They're going to come and we all meet in June. They have time to finish the projects. Nobody finishes on time. It's just like busy people. So in the general demographic It's ranging from people who are retiring to young people who have homes that they just want to figure out how to how to live, they don't know anything they've never had a home before. And I always say, just start with a simple bench. If you've got a bench, you've got the man's first interaction with land. Get a bench, sit on it and ponder, just to laugh about things.

Angelique
Do yo see it being useful for landscapers that want to get into design as well?

Mary Palmer Dargan
Well, I was a professor. And so this is comparable to one of the best residential landscape design programs you could ever have, believe me, and it is something that you wish you can join the Association of Professional Landscape Designers and go through...they require many, many, many, I think it's 400 hours of active study and qualify, you have to have to be of some sort, or at least experienced, show them your final products. And that's a great, great group of support for all of your rest of your life. The is called the APLD. I love that group. And it's really for residential, primarily.

And then there's the American Society of Landscape Architects, which is very nice. I've been a member of that forever. But the APLD is very different that's really designed to help professional landscape designers do the best I can with all the vicissitudes of business sourcing, whether you're design build firm, or if you're just designers and they give out big awards, we got a Gold International award last year, very proud of that.

Yeah, it's a great group. And this course that we teach is will get you set up so you can at least start their process from membership. And you can join as an associate, but to get the letters after your name, which is a APLD. You need to actually pass through their professional certification.

Angelique
Yeah, yeah, of course. Oh, that's great. Well, it sounds like you're starting to kick people off on that process of getting to become a professional landscape designer. That is fantastic. We I think we need a lot more people interested in our industry and sounds like you're doing a great job to progress that Thank you.

Mary Palmer Dargan
I'm really happy to have a co producer named Arielle McIntyre. She's millennial. All of our  past work, all of the teaching, read all of our books, you write out a list of things because she has a permaculture degree and, and you make this better than it ever has been before. She's doesn't fear about doing this. And she's awesome. And now she's absorbed all the philosophy. She now has projects of her own through our office, and she's just not running a course anymore. She's learned and I'm very proud of her.

That as an architect, I work with who telecommutes from Florida, and we do a lot of very professional drawings for property owners associations plant some developments, but mainly we do residential. It's just my favorite thing to do. I like the people.

Angelique 
And you can form that connection with your clients as well working with them over time learning who they are. Yeah, no, that's great. Well, and we met Ariel at our event, as well, she
mentioned. And I love this phrase. She said about our event that it was the magic in the margins. Do you want to explain what that means to you?

Mary Palmer Dargan
It made she has a host who she's a millennial. I don't know what the margins are. I don't think it's the bottom line of costs, believe me. Which is more math territory, as a head of a business. But I believe what she's referring to is a permaculture principle where the interactions on the perimeters of your property are where the action happens in nature. And one of my sayings is that we want to bring nature back in and make a buffer zone, like you have your own. Your own unified niche in nature is your home property. And the margins would be this buffer zone that we put to protect us from bad use of your neighbor or from winds or some strange, you know, erosion problem and or sun to shade your house. And that is what we talked about with National Wildlife Federation's principles of if you create a place for birds to rest and nest and breed and feed, you then interacted in a positive way with nature. And that's all in the margins. It's all in the buffer zones the little scrubby areas the undefined, undefined areas around your property. That's one way to describe doesn't ecological more margin. She may have Portman esoteric margin in mind. She talks about your your event, but I loved your event it has everything I ever wanted to know about the industry is fabulous. Fantastic.

Angelique
Well, and a lot of people are wondering where we fit in. And, you know, we've tried to say that it's connecting of the sector's you know, your landscape architect, but you are more involved with the construction and thinking through the maintenance. Do you have any good examples that, that show how the connection of of the sectors can benefit somebody's business? Or how you design a property or?

Mary Palmer Dargan
Yeah, that's a good question. I place projects with people at this point in my career. I'm in a particular community, I know an awful lot of really, really skilled workmen. And I know the limitations of their crews like one would be not good at building 40 foot retaining walls or federate beautifully hand shaped block walls, along someone's driveway or edging, you know, so I'm, I'm always seeing people's capabilities and in their, their, their equipment and how you access properties and may not be answering your question quite right.

But I'm always and then I'm trying to, okay, we need to colonize this area of plant materials is now it's a chocolate brownie, it's been, you know, filled with new dirt, and we've put in some boulders and it's all waiting for the birth of a garden. And so I'm trying to think through, okay, who's growing these plants, are they at the nurseries? Now the nurseries are out of all these things. So I'm trying to find people encourage them to start niche nurseries and certain crops that are, you know, endless, really low supply that we need every day. And there are a lot of those. So we've got some, some backyard nursery men that we tapped into, but really the heavy equipment and the stonework, the woodwork for arbors, the lighting companies, my projects are so vast in many ways, and they're pretty and people bluntly, I've got you're only as good as the clients you receive. I've got great clients and they want, they want really amazing and products honored by that tremendously take take very seriously about all that trust.

So it's, I've actually made some, I'm not trying to take credit for this. I mean, I've worked very hard. But now some of these landscape contractors that I've worked with for 20 years, they are the top of the market. I mean, I hope I can get some projects, because I've really learned what people expect and how to work, especially with our Hispanic crews there. And I don't have crews, I'm just a designer, the crews, I'm really encouraging everyone to learn Spanish as well as I'm encouraging them to learn English and they, it is very difficult to communicate with the homeowner, if three of the crew members that are left there really are insecure with their English and the homeowner doesn't know really what to say or help and it becomes frustrating. So I'm trying to help with the language thing and just so cute. Arielle just went off to Spanish school while speaking, you know business Spanish here in town. So there's a whole lot of that interconnectivity with community needs and like to place nicer communication.

Angelique
Well, and you brought up two things that I'd like to touch on. And one is that when you are a more residential landscape architect, you actually do a possibly very different job than you would if you're a commercial landscape architect, you are kind of the focal point of the entire project, you are the liaison for the client. So you have a lot of different hats that you wear.

And knowing about the products and how the crews work, and all that is very critical to being able to achieve the design. And I think that's interesting to point out because it's not as obvious what landscape architects that do residential jobs are like and what your role consists of. So a very different roles. So I think that there's so much more to it, you're almost a project manager as well as a designer.

Mary Palmer Dargan
Yes, and I sort of like to jump in other people's business so always try and make sure you're doing the right thing and down the same road get the same and park and not because I have to deal with getting plans submitted. This is really what it boils down to is the action steps.

We work with a program to create a Master Plan to then break that down. So that answers any kind of property owners association requirements, or goes off to the county to be approved for erosion control, or these rock walls have to have engineered footings after they get over five feet tall. There's a whole lot of that kind of instantly, I'm basically an engineer. And then the engineering work has to be, you know, done and parsed out to people that give good estimates that we feel good about them, building it, and then checked at checkup on an awful lot of stuffs.

But I do work in many, many places. I happen to love my part of western North Carolina, and feel the number rule stewards for this. So the way that it is very handy if you are someone with the background that I have in erosion control, stormwater drainage, hardscapes, tree protection, about everything for our village now that are much stronger because we're under huge development, pressure, huge, unsurprisingly.

So we stopped to developments recently because of the impact on the environment. We don't have the infrastructure to support sewer water, or their basic topography needs. They they're draining right into the headwaters of the Chattooga River. And it's very scary because the county doesn't have very strong measures to mitigate this when someone a big development brings in developer brings in their plans. The county goes okay, you've got that detail that detail that detail, rubber stamps that goes out the door, I'm in a group called Develop Cashiers Responsibly, and we're going "Why is not working here? That doesn't work." The whole county might be able to be done like that. But not Cashiers were too steep and mountainous. And so what happens by having this kind of background of protecting Mother Nature, and knowing how people live, we're trying to, you know, talk some sense and some of our developer friends and then they're listening, and we're trying to make this place, look and act right, not the cookie cutter place we want to be as eccentric as we can achieve it.

Well, so good to have a lot of roadwork, the saying is when you come out of college, you only begin your training, and it takes three years to be an intern before you can even be a landscape architect, then you have to sit for the exam. And then you might sit for that exam. I mean, the percentage of people that actually pass the exam is very low, you take a couple of times and life gets in the way you retake it again. But then you need to go and intern again and start learning about how people live and how to manage a project like this. So the course we teach is really based on real life stuff. And I'm very proud of that. And it's nice to share.

I'm almost 70 it gives you some pleasure to think you might have something useful to offer people over time.

Angelique
I think you're doing a great job. And I think that passing on that knowledge. Yeah, it's it's a very giving a view to do that for the next generation. The second point I had was you talked about Spanish and how it's an important part of dealing with the crews and you know, Ariel going to learn Spanish. We have as you know, Aimee Almaguer that's with us, she is going to at the end of each of these podcasts, she's going to summarize it in Spanish as well. So we're reaching more people and, and actually expanding you know, who gets the benefit of these podcasts. So we're really excited to have her on board and and doing some, some work after the fact to so yeah, hopefully that will help you. You can even tell your the crews that you work with about about that, and hopefully they'll tune in as well.

Mary Palmer Dargan
They're really hungry for knowledge. I'm so impressed. We've had one or two students and I often give a course to them, you know if it's someone who's really obviously trying to learn, and then you know, Rob Young, we got mountain community it's they're just hard working people who live here hadn't had a chance to go off to college or they're young high school students during the summer working on crews and we all give I usually have these little gifts, scholarships, and we've had really nice, really nice interaction with young people. They come back years later and say, gosh, thank you for that. It helped me you understand better what the big picture was.

Angelique
Oh, fantastic. Oh, that's great. so what is next for you?

Mary Palmer Dargan
Going to see Longue Cue Gardens in New Orleans, and it's a wonderful symposium that they do once a year and it has usually some that has to do with houses. This time there's a fashion designer who I'm speaking opposite a fashion designer. So I think my motto [will be] "Fits your landscape to your lifestyle like a glove." It's a couture lifestyle outside. That's not a bad elevator pitch either.

I'm really involved with Garden Writers of America. I'm the co director. We also have a lot of courses coming up soon at different organizations, the Center for Life Enhancement in Highlands, North Carolina has a three part course that we're teaching over a period of three weeks, it's one time a week. And people love that course. It takes you in a sort of short snippets through our big offering of teaching, and people go out and they make differences. They note that they know plant materials better, they kind of know how to choose the right people to help work with and have a better sense of control over their future projects.

We have a big seasonal community in the summers. I mean, we blow up around here, holidays and Cashiers are amazing. So and then we have a creative one at the Baskin, which is a beautiful art museum in Hollister. It's about how to create a model of space. And this is on the outside. So we're actually using props, like they be wading pools and traffic cones and orange and green flags and streamers. And you know, the rolling tape that you tag tag plants with and we're doing that to mark off spaces so people can understand how big a 20 foot diameter space is, how much your pace is, if you're walking off, how can you measure something without a measuring wheel and a tape measure?

Angelique
I do that all the time. We do that all the time. 

Mary Palmer Dargan  
The pace is great. I happen to have exactly a five foot pace that helps. So if you see me muttering as I'm walking down a road, I'm counting. And then we're gonna you know, have some people pretend to be trees and and talk about how to situate sculpture. You know, all of that. It's an outdoor workshop of how to model a space. And that's, there's two new gardens they want to do. We've done this before for the village green here in Cashiers and we did a healing garden and then sketched it when everybody's finished pretending they were plants and waiting pools, stepping stones and then raise money in the garden and built and I did great they serve the community need because we had the community get involved with it.

Angelique
I would think it also go a long way to showing people what we do when you design a space and realizing the impact that it can have by changing the design.

Mary Palmer Dargan
Yeah, it's nice to feel that you're free. You know, if you just sketch something, you can change it 1000 times before you put a shovel on the ground, or order a truckload of concrete. It's a lot easier to make mistakes and get a budget and work all that out on paper. It makes for a much better communicator with your people, your skilled help.

I consider them all consultants that I'm learning from every day you get with a Mason. Gosh, I just want to know exactly what they're doing with says rock is what tool he's using and how big it is going to be. How the joint is going to work. I mean, we talked about it all. You never stop learning about that the great outdoors and construction interface.

But it's really important to learn how to rest lightly on the land and use sustainable principles. And a lot of things I've noticed at your particular event, which was fabulous, is the fact that at SYNKD [Live], you get to hear the best practices from different parts of the industry, whether it's leaf collection, or if it's mowing with a robot. Things that are recyclable, sustainable, thinking out of the box, how to plant something on the steep slope and use a bio technical engineering device that will dissolve over time. I'm trying to do some other things you had so many wonderful nuggets that came to me out of that but with people like the most of the robot. Everybody wants a robot to mow their lawn.

Angelique 
Yeah, yeah, I think it takes a different way of thinking though. I think, you know, all these, these changes, these new innovations. You don't just adopt them right away. You have to figure out how to incorporate it in your business. And that's what we're hoping to do.

But I was just so happy that you said that you would be on our podcast, we are just launching this. So it's all a bit new for us at SYNKD. I love having you on Mary Palmer. And I love having you as part of our community, and educating and your dedication for the industry. So thank you so much for being with us today. And we look forward to showcasing some of your work in the future.