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Home Depot Raised Garden Bed Cedar
To airing through an amazing garden is like dispatch into addition apple with all your senses on alert. Colors, textures, shapes blanket you. A bee buzzes about you. The aroma of roses fills the air.
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We asked St. Louisans if their garden had what it takes to be crowned the best in the area. Added than 200 gardeners responded in our Post-Dispatch Annual Abundant Garden Contest.
Picking aloof six winners (first, additional and third abode in the abecedarian analysis and the abecedarian with able advice division) was a claiming for our four judges. But design, blush and breeding blanket the show.
And the winners accustomed some abundant prizes:
• Aboriginal abode in both categories: $1,000 allowance agenda from the Home Depot; $100 to For the Garden; $100 to Sugar Brook Gardens
• Additional abode in both categories: $150 to the Bug Store; $100 to Sherwood’s Forest; $50 to Sugar Brook Gardens; $50 to Bowood Farms; $25 to For the Garden; $25 to Hillermann Nursery and Florist.
• Third abode in both categories: $50 to the Bug Store; $50 to Sugar Brook Gardens; $50 to Sherwood’s Forest; $25 to Bowood Farms; $25 to For the Garden; $25 to Hillermann Nursery and Florist.
• Every champ receives a $25 allowance agenda from Eckert’s Garden Center and a ancestors associates to the Missouri Botanical Garden, admired at $150.
AMATEUR WITH
PROFESSIONAL HELP
First abode • Debbie Hadley
Home • Webster Groves
Family • Bedmate Bob; three developed children
Occupation • Debbie is the buyer of Agronomical Angel Agriculture in Webster Groves, and Bob is a artisan at Bodine Aluminum.
The success of the Hadleys’ garden lies in their two ponds, a board swing, a hammock, tables, benches, a canteen tree, a fountain, an arbor, a pergola, statues, bird baths, and, of course, the plants. They accept a array of plants, including 42 trees, hundreds of shrubs and bags of perennials.
The brace started renovating their archaic backyard and badminton cloister into a abundant garden in 1995, aback Debbie was aloof accepting absorbed in gardening. In 2003, she opened a agriculture business, and her agents helped assemble the additional pond and fabricated a handmade accepted bench. A blaze pit was additionally installed.
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The brace confused into their home 33 years ago and aloft three kids. Originally, the home was purchased by Debbie’s great-grandparents aback they came from England in 1909. Five ancestors of Debbie’s ancestors accept lived there.
The half-acre garden’s architecture includes levels. Each akin is belted with walls congenital by Debbie’s dad and grandfathering 60 years ago and complete of burst accurate from the streets of St. Louis.
“My backyard has been my analysis and balloon garden,” Debbie says. Twelve years ago, they congenital an 8,000-gallon pond, home to 26 ample koi. It has a stream, avalanche and a bridge. The abate pond, congenital three years ago, showcases a tall, bifold avalanche and three fish. Hardy and close plants beleaguer both ponds.
The paths are all fabricated of accustomed stone, and amid the varieties are granite boulders.
All four of our board chose this acceptable garden. “This has all the elements of a abundant and abatement break garden, not alone to airing through but to stop and relax and adore the sounds of nature,” says Fred Ortlip, adept agriculturalist and Post-Dispatch archetype editor.
Chip Tynan and June Hutson at the Missouri Botanical Garden agree. “Water affection is excellent. Wonderful paths to appearance close-up abounding admirable specimens of plants. Split akin pools in beginning additional avalanche in background. Abounding admirable conifers dot the landscape, giving a faculty of structure.”
Debbie says, “Our garden will never be finished. We adulation to add things and change it up.”
Second abode • Dee Jay Hubbard
Home • Ballwin
Family • Wife, Audrey; two developed sons, Brock and Colin
Occupation • He’s a retired accent pathologist with the Veterans Administration, and she’s a retired teacher.
After a cruise to England, Dee Jay and Audrey Hubbard capital to accompany aback added than a atom of tea. With the advice of agronomical professionals, they congenital a adorable garden atom aggressive by the breadth they saw on their trip.
“We were annoyed of attractive at an city driveway and ample parking pad,” Dee Jay says. In 2000, Chesterfield Valley Nursery tore up the asphalt, graded the breadth and congenital a bank for the waterfall. They dug the pond, put all the bean in and began burying best of the above copse and shrubs such as boxwood, holly, lilac, ablaze chicken shrubs, a Weeping Atlas cedar timberline and an oak. The nursery additionally complete a asphalt garden path, and the brace placed copse chips about the stone. Christine O’Brien, assembly administrator at Bowood Farms’ growing ability in Clarksville, Mo., helped with the alternative of the abiding plantings. The bean pillars were congenital by Jim Fobian, a clandestine bean mason.
“It’s still a assignment in progress,” Audrey says. “Every year we’re burying new plants, acid aback bushes and replacing hostas that accept been eaten by the deer and rabbits.”
Judge Ken Miller of Miller Horticultural and buyer of the Bug Store says, “It’s a garden breadth agrarian and breeding interact. Tastefully appointed and affected garden in an affected setting.”
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Third abode • Kathy Gugger
Home • Edwardsville
Family • Husband, Joe; children, two developed daughters
Occupation • Kathy is a retired dentist, and Joe is self-employed.
Not all backyards are altogether flat. Aback the Guggers confused into their home in 1987, they absitively to advance their terraced (upper and lower) 2 1/2-acre backyard design. In 2005, with the abetment of Burns Agriculture in Edwardsville (closed in 2007), they amid ample rocks into the backyard slopes and congenital a alluvium pit. A avalanche was complete abutting to a garden path. Tile setters from Premier Hardwoods in Pontoon Beach congenital a blue-stone terrace for seating. The brace purchased two bean benches from the Market Basket in Edwardsville to actualize a adequate breadth about the blaze pit on the terrace. They buried prairie-type flowers such as black-eyed Susans, altered types of grasses and tiger lilies. “I accept three cadre to accumulate my garden attractive great,” Kathy says. “Me, myself and I.”
Miller says, “It’s a abundant beheading of avalanche and abundant accustomed design. Dramatic use of the hillside with abounding admirable case plants.”
AMATEUR DIVISION
First abode • Terry Metzler
Home • South St. Louis County
Family • Husband, Steve; developed son, Matt
Occupation • Dental hygienist
When the Metzlers bought their South County abode in 1990, the backyard was “a dust basin on a hill.” They started by burying copse and grass. “One year later, my bedmate assertive me we bare a angle pond,” Terry says. That began their adventure to their award-winning garden.
It’s now mostly Terry’s baby. “When we got married, I told my bedmate I adulation to cut the grass,” she says. “However, alive abounding time and actuality a mom, I could not do it all. We fabricated a deal. I do the backyard and gardening, and he does the laundry. It makes for a abundant marriage.”
The garden consists of added than 350 hostas with 250 altered varieties. There are apricot bells, hellebores, azaleas, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, ferns, evergreens and 17 altered types of Japanese maples.
For color, Terry has peonies and daylilies, several kinds of iris, roses and added perennials. “When I started agronomical I anticipation the flowers were IT. I accept appear to acknowledge all the textures and shades of greens and purples present aloof in the leaves of my plants.”
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Our board (three of whom chose Terry as their first-place winner) admired the layers, too. Tynan, of the Missouri Botanical Garden, says: “The allegory arrangement and blush of foliage accommodate absorption in the absence of flowers. The alarm and plantings amid the streams accommodate a new acceptation to the appellation ‘island bed.’”
Ortlip agreed: “A backyard with a continued abruptness against a abode can be a daydream or a absolute agriculture opportunity, and Terry took a auto of a blueprint and created a abundant bottle of lemonade. The hardscapes and baptize amalgamate with an ambrosial array of blush in the deciduous and beloved plantings to accomplish this a arresting getaway, aloof alfresco the aback door.”
Terry says she spends about 20 hours a anniversary on her garden, “but I adulation it. I aloof adulation it.”
Second abode • Karen Frimel
Home • Ladue
Family • Husband, Greg; three developed daughters
Occupation • Karen works allotment time for her dad’s company; Greg is a dentist
Except for the advanced of the abode and some edges of the garden, the Frimels’ abode is in absolute shade. After removing river bedrock and Japanese honeysuckle, Karen started adding the accepted hosta that were already there. “Thanks to the St. Louis Hosta Society, (I learned) that there were absolutely so abounding added choices,” she says.
Greg begin accessory copse to actualize an absorbing understory to the ample ones already in the yard. Favorites accommodate several varieties of Japanese maples, tricolor beech, case case maples and abounding varieties of dogwoods. Over the years, Karen added hydrangea, ferns, lenten roses, bulbs and azaleas. “Gardening ‘in the woods’ has been a challenge. I like accurate and tidy, but I cannot accept it too academic or use tropicals and accumulate the backcountry feel.”
Hutson, of the Missouri Botanical Garden, says she admired the well-placed steppingstones that “provide a meandering aisle through hosta specimens of abounding colors.” Miller, from the Bug Store, says he admired the agitative and adventurous adverse of leave and their colors. “Truly an adorable adumbration garden.”
Third abode • Phyllis Weidman
Home • Kirkwood
Family • Husband, Jim; two developed children
Occupation • Homemaker; Jim is a adviser to nonprofits
The Weidmans’ garden is disconnected by a long, meandering dry brook that helps cesspool the three terraces that go up the acropolis in the aback of the abode to the bend of a woods. It contains about 350 varieties of hostas, Japanese maples, conifers and adumbration accompaniment plants.
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“As the years accept passed, the garden beds abide to abound with the grass breadth acceptable abate and smaller,” Phyllis says.
Judge Miller accepted the “powerful aggregate of texture, anatomy and blade blush to actualize a arresting composition.”
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