Congratulations Steve and Alan! Very nice gardens, and of course, pictures. They must have used your pictures, right? I would venture to say that your yards don't quite look like that at this point in the year...

Yeah, I made an online photo album of all my best garden photos, and after they picked the ones they wanted, I gave them full-resolution versions. It certainly doesn't look like that this time of year!

Steve, your gardens really are beautiful. Yours too Alan. Even though I have a very small back yard, it has a lot of potential. The problem is, I don't know how to bring it up to that potential.

Congrats Steve! This must be very exciting for you.

Derek, I need to acknowledge that when we had this blank canvas to work with, it was a little daunting. So, we hired a landscape designer to help us get our vision articulated and to give us the details on how to implement it. His name was Allan Christean, and he used to work for Linden Nursery. I think he's still working in Utah somewhere. He was great to work with.

My strengths have been in getting things to grow, but on the design side of things, I'm still learning a lot. I'd really like to become well skilled in garden design, but I don't think I'm there yet. I did redesign my front flowerbed last fall, and we'll see this summer how that works out! I got the confidence to do that redesign after reading a useful book: "The Well-Designed Mixed Garden" by Tracy DiSabato-Aust. The book was a little slow at first, but I got a lot out of it after sticking with it for a while.

Hey Steve

When my granddaughter saw your girls in the previous page to mine she thought she was one of them! I guess because she saw pappa and grandma on the next page.

I'd like to get a trellis like yours with climbing roses and clematis growing over it. The two look beautiful together, like the entrance area at Lagoon. When we went there last summer I was surprised by how many cool weeping conifers and other neat flora they have. Someone really knew what they were doing when they planted their gardens.

Great looking yard. I also have a half-acre to work with, which sometimes seems a little daunting, and expensive, with my addiction to unusual plants.

Alan

Steve--Congrats on the writeup. I wish they took a different approach to making the magazine available online. I had trouble reading it in that format (not that I'm old enough that my eyes are starting to go bad or anything).

Those gardens look wonderful! Congratulations to both of you. I'd really like to see the 'live' versions. There are a lot of great gardens down in the Lindon area. There's one down the street from my sister in law that is a perfect fit for the pages of Country Gardens Magazine- I'm sure you know which garden I'm speaking of. Lots of rustic charm.

Side Note- it might be fun to do a 'garden web gardens' tour this summer. I used to help organize those for a local garden club and it was a lot of fun.

I wish my yard were ready for that but I have quite a ways to go still- we ripped everything out, removed about 1/2 of the grass area in the back etc. After spending a pretty fair chunk of change, we're only back to grass and empty beds, well beds with giant boulders sitting in them looking odd and without context- but now with the infastructure needed to build a great yard.

Steve- I STILL haven't gotten my pergola built and you and I first met on that thread 2 years ago. This spring is the magical time- I think.

Bindersbee,

I hope you have fun building your pergola. I really enjoyed building mine. I created that design in a quick sketch after looking over a number of designs in Sunset books and some other sources. I only have one modification I'll probably make -- I need to extend the lattice down a little lower so it will be easier to get a vine to grow up on it. I can't really use the corner posts for the vines, because I think they're too close to the roses and the trees.

I have some little Clematis 'Ville de Lyon' plants that I've grown from cuttings off of my established plant, but I'm afraid they won't do well there because of the Swedish aspen roots that will compete with them too much for water and nutrients. I still haven't decided what to grow on it, but I'm leaning heavily toward climbing roses. Probably Zephirine Drouhin, because she won't mind growing up the shady side, and she's not thorny. Any other suggestions?

I suppose if I grow a climbing rose there, I can get the canes growing up the lattice without extending it lower, but if it were the clematis, I'd need more support down low.

I really like using vines which will die back to the ground in winter and come up fresh each season. It extends the life of the pergola. One such vine (which would probably require special order) is a Golden Hops Vine- Humulus aurea. Beautiful foliage. It also gets some small white flowers but the leaves are the stunner. This is the vine I most often use and I generally order a few at the beginning of the season to have for all the installs over the summer.

Another cool vine is the Porcelain Berry Vine. The foliage is somewhat maple like and dappled with white variegation. In the fall, the berries come on and go through a series of colors from hot pink to orchid to bright purple to light blue to cobalt blue. Berries of all colors are on the vine at any given time. My sister is building a pergola just so she can have this vine! LOL! It is more readily available than the Golden Hops vine.

I've wondered the same thing about the vines -- sounds like it's likely that climbing roses could start to break my lattice, huh? I'm actually not a big fan of lattice anyway, but it was a quick way to make the arbor more enclosed and shaded.

Anyway, I did already get some seeds for Lablab vine (Dolichos lablab) -- it's an ornamental bean with cool purple pods. I saw it at the Denver Botanical Garden last year and thought it looked really cool. I think I'll try it this year and see how it works. It will probably be gentler on the arbor than the climbing roses.

Very cool and what a beautiful yard!!! Congrats on yer success Steve... I'll post a couple links to some slideshow's I put together of my yard as our taste are similar... Hopefully you can get them to play, photodex has a player that needs to be downloaded only takes a minute or so... Don't forget the sound... And yes, I do fly fish...

http://www.photodex.com/sharing/viewshow.html?fl=2950569&alb=0

http://www.photodex.com/sharing/viewshow.html?fl=2950285&alb=0

Just wanted to say thanks everyone for posting I am brand new to cedar city ut and learning all I can about gardening here....yes I am a bit afraid of all the clay and rock I have to deal with.
thanks..happy gardening
dee