Planning And Patience Produce Professional Results

By Ron Dieter, Sunnyfield Greenhouse & Gardens

Some homeowners feel that to have a good-looking landscape, they need to hire a professional to do the job. Mats and Teri Jonmaker have proven, however, that a quality job can be done by the owners themselves.  With careful planning and some good research beforehand, they were able to create a top-notch landscape that fits their family's lifestyle.  Today their midwest home has a beautiful patio garden room, children's play area, and perennial border that are the results of their own minds and muscles.

Mats, who works for Martin Engineering Company, does a great deal of traveling on business. Over the years he has seen a lot of landscapes, both public and private, and developed a sense for what works and what doesn't. "Teri and I wanted to have a summer season room," Mats says.  "We watched for good garden ideas, read garden magazines, and bought books to educate ourselves.  The pretty pictures gave us some high hopes, but re-creating them is not easy to do.  We learned to be patient and plan our work.  It took us a couple years to decide what we wanted, and then we got to work."

They started by rebuilding the patio area outside the glass doors of their dining area to create their garden room.  The floor is exposed aggregate concrete enclosed on the south by the house and on the west and north by a six foot solid cedar board fence topped with latticework.  The result is a cozy private area shaded by a mature flowering crabapple tree and opening onto the lawn and the play area for their daughters, Natalie and Lauren.

Every garden planning book says a good design leads a visitor to move through the garden, curious about what lies ahead.  The Jonmakers' garden does just that.   When you step onto the patio from the house, your eye is naturally drawn to collection of pots and containers placed around the sitting area.  Clay pots of assorted sizes are filled with yellow daisies, ornamental sweet potatoes, coleus, pink geraniums, purple heliotrope, and yellow snapdragons. The pots can be rearranged like furniture to change the décor.  Spirea 'Goldmound' shrubs grow in planting areas between the patio floor and the fence panels.  The bushes soften the fences and give the patio a natural feel in the cold months of the year.

The fence "walls" are decorated with ivy geraniums in baskets hung from decorative iron brackets.  The east side opens onto the lawn and play area.   The sound of water encourages you to step off the patio and around the fence. There the visitor finds a garden pool nestled in a collection of shade plants, including Hosta and Hydrangea 'Anna Belle', under the shelter of the flowering crab.  The eye is then drawn to a mixed perennial border along the back of the lawn, edged with a low flagstone wall that gracefully curves around the garden and dissappears into the bank at the back of the border.  The perennial garden and wall was their most recent project. They installed it last summer and it is already well established.

Teri says, "The kids enjoy the yard, and we spend a lot of family time out here."  Mats agrees, "After a day inside the office, it's peaceful and relaxing to be out here in the garden.  We created what we wanted, and doing it by ourselves for ourselves was very rewarding."