Alcove is a quarterly digital magazine for the woman who has stood in a garden somewhere in the world — Provence, Tuscany, the Cotswolds, a riad courtyard in Marrakech — and come home unable to stop thinking about it.

She knows what she wants her garden to feel like. She just doesn’t know how to get there.

Alcove exists to close that gap. Through features on real gardens worth returning to, design essays, plant guides, and the Alcove Method — a five-step framework for translating the feeling of any garden you love into one that works where you live — we give our readers the designer’s eye they’ve been missing.

These are not show gardens. They are lived-in spaces, tended across seasons and years, by women who understand that a garden is not a project to finish but a place to return to.

What We Believe

The feeling you experienced in that garden abroad wasn’t just coming from the plants. It was coming from the surfaces, the age, the enclosure, and the restraint. Understanding that changes everything about how you approach your own garden.

Smallness is not a limitation. It is a boundary that clarifies what matters.

Restraint is not absence. It is intention.

About the Founder

Alcove was founded by DaShan Nixon, a landscape designer with nearly thirty years of personal garden obsession.

DaShan has spent over a decade designing residential gardens — and most of her life trying to understand why certain spaces stop you completely while others simply don’t. That question took her to Spain and the South of France for a milestone birthday, where she spent days walking through Barcelona, Ibiza, Mallorca, Ajaccio, Marseille, and Aix-en-Provence, noticing everything that caught her eye and asking why.

The answer became Alcove.

Her work as a designer centers on the translation layer between the garden you fell in love with somewhere in the world and the garden you actually go home to every day. That is what this magazine is about.

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Start here: The Alcove Method — How to Bring Home the Feeling of a Garden You Love — is a free five-email series that walks you through the framework DaShan uses every time. Start the free series