A modest yard at the end of an east-side cul-de-sac is so peaceful, angels call it home.
Helen Phillips' cottage garden-style landscaping has been 28 years in the making around her blonde brick, ranch-style home on Lark Street in Jefferson City.
A former Master Gardener, who once served on the selection committee herself, Phillips was honored with the July Yard of the Month from the Central Missouri Master Gardeners and the Bittersweet Garden Club.
Her yard "was a nice surprise," one judge said. "The backyard was so welcoming and colorful. Helen must have put a lot of love into every inch."
Phillips would agree.
"It's not just a garden. My plants tell a story," Phillips said.
Many of her perennials were started from gifts or from old farmhouses that remind her of her childhood home on a farm in Tebbetts. Many of the decorations have been painted by her 8-year-old granddaughter, Kali. And several places and pieces are reminders of her late son and other family she has lost.
Her hours in the garden are like therapy, she said.
Then, she takes time to admire what she has created from her sitting area underneath the carport. Nearby is her signature shovel, always at the ready beside her backdoor along with other gardening essentials for routine maintenance.
Phillips has nine paths through her almost entirely perennial beds.
"All her individual gardens with their own separate paths to walk through was fun for the visitors - even her garden of good and evil with the gargoyles," a second judge said. "She had a good variety of perennials with just the right amount of whimsy. It's a good example of what one can do even with a smaller garden."
The backyard corner guarded by gargoyles once was a vegetable garden. Now, she is looking to convert the sunny perennials to more shade-loving as the nearby oak trees mature.
"It's under construction, just like a website," she said.
Most of her plant choices are old-fashioned varieties, including lilac, roses, iris, peony and hydrangea.
And little of her beds have been deliberately designed; rather, they have evolved as she works on them, she said.
"I don't sit down and draw it out," she said. "The ideas just come to me as I work."
Several of the beds started with the intent to curb rainwater.
Along one side, she started with one yucca plant on a backyard slope; and today, she has a room-sized bed on that slope, which guides water beside another bed into a dry creek bed in a third that sends the excess stormwater to the front curb.
At the rear property line is a large stormwater creek, which she has disguised with boxwood and rock-lined beds.
"I thought she incorporated her flowerbeds effectively into the backyard slope to minimize damage from rainwater runoff," a third judge said.
Phillips also quickly turned the loss of a large shade tree in her front yard this spring into a whimsical accent, planting marigolds and other annuals around the stump, where a concrete turtle watches the street.
The other new addition to Phillips' yard was a shade bed between two mature oak trees in her front yard.
"I like to make use of curves in the flower beds, adding interest and helping the eye to flow around the yard, bringing you curiously into the yard," Phillips said.
She has a saying: "Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.
"Well, I have been performing this art for 28 years to get the yard to its present state, scratching in the dirt a little bit at a time."