After a hyper-focused hunt for a place in Charleston, Dianne Avalon found a property that checked all the boxes: not only was it on the street of her dreams, but it also possessed enough history to be interesting and enough promise to be cultivated and worthy of future preservation. Over the ensuing three decades, she has transformed the house into a home defined by personal touches and precise attention to detail—especially when it comes to her beloved garden. It's an idyllic expanse that blends structural boxwoods and three distinct garden “rooms” with Dianne's “charming inhabitants”—all conjured as if by magic from a vacant lot through a collaboration with landscape architects Hugh and Mary Palmer Dargan.
Today, the house is one of South of Broad’s most enduring and endearing landmarks, but its garden has remained a mostly private pleasure. Until now. Enjoy this rare glimpse at what lies behind the gates.
Dianne and her husband, John, fell in love with Charleston more than 40 years ago. Though she and her family lived in New York at the time, Charleston’s alluring downtown peninsula—and in particular one historic stretch—captured her heart over a series of visits; eventually, she decided to move.
“It was Bastille Day, 1989,” says Dianne, as she recounts the timeline of her family's relocation from Manhattan to the circa-1818 house that had first caught her eye two years earlier during her search for the perfect place in Charleston. “We fell in love with the house straight away, but it was clear from the beginning that we would need help with the rest of the property,” she recalls. “The grounds basically consisted of a paved parking lot and little else, which was never going to work for us.”
Enter Mary Palmer and Hugh Dargan, the nationally renowned masterminds behind Dargan Landscape Architects, a Cashiers, North Carolina–based firm with Charleston ties and project credits across the country and throughout the South, from the Virgin Islands to the Smoky Mountains (where they recently completed an English-style garden for the co-founders of Blackberry Farm).
“We saw the potential beneath the surface immediately,” says Mary Palmer. “The house had been split into multiple units, each of which had its own parking area. Dianne knew what she wanted for her garden and property and, well, that sure wasn’t it. Through a mutual friend’s recommendation, she found us and basically enlisted our input on day one. From there, it was off to the races.”
This would be a garden from scratch. Extensive research failed to turn up any trace of an excavatable garden or previous landscape plan, but the Dargans loved the challenge of transforming this outdoor hardscape into something lush and verdant and inspiring. Part of the mandate was to introduce new plantings and features that combined a mixture of fresh and immediately impactful growth but that would also evolve over time into something that felt like it had always been there. To do that required loads of new plant material combined with an overall plan rooted in history and knowledge of local flora. In other words, the goal was to create a new garden with roots.
“Because our vision was built on the idea of an imagined re-creation of something historic that would match the provenance of the house,” Mary Palmer explains, “rather than on an actual restoration of something that once was, we knew we could realize a vision for what this garden could be better than anyone else.”
The special alchemy that resulted from the collaboration between the Dargans and Dianne further elevated the project. “Dianne was the driving force in shaping this legacy space, and our relationship was nothing if not a partnership,” Mary Palmer says. “She is a genius. And she had a plan that worked so brilliantly with ours—from the boxwoods we trucked in to the creation of new brick walls made in the exact specifications of the mortar-free, 19th century style, to the enduring game of chase between native saltwater-resistant roses and the Georgia jasmine that just keeps climbing.”
