The words “sleek,” “clean” and “architectural” aren’t often used to describe landscapes and gardens. But in the case of this Frontenac home, they fit.

When they built their current home less than two years ago, the homeowners, now empty nesters, were looking for “easy livability.” The words “clean modern aesthetic” described what they wanted for the interior of the home, where the predominant color palette is “a mix of warm neutrals.”

When Patrick Barrett built his striking, hilltop home in Des Peres 15 years ago, he loved everything about it. The gorgeous stone architecture had a timeless European appeal. The views of the surrounding countryside were spectacular. There was one thing, however, he hated. The ugly 15-to-20-foot retaining wall that was designed to re-enforce the hillside to install a swimming pool just outside the home’s walkout lower level. Not only was it unattractive, as the father of five active children, he viewed the drop off as dangerous.

It is hard for Brian Davies to remember a time when he wasn’t tending a garden. Growing up in north St. Louis County, he happily took over his parent’s garden. When he bought a home in University City, most of the yard became a garden. Six years ago, he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to the Central West End, where he is again making gardening magic.

     Jesse Gilbertson first discovered the concept of bonsai during a landscape design class at the University of Missouri. “One of our projects involved a table full of small trees, a table full of decorative pots and piles of rocks. We had to take a tree and match it with a pot and match it with some rocks,” he explains.

Where to find them: Emerson Conservatory

During the cold winter months, the Orchid Show transforms the Emerson Conservatory into a beautiful display of the Garden’s extensive tropical orchid collection. This collection boasts over 5,000 individual plants and 700 unique species, of which nearly one in ten are threatened or endangered.

When Fred Ortlip worked nights as a copy editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he used his daytime hours for a round or two of golf each week with his Post colleagues. As he watched his ball sail down the fairway or eyeballed the correct line of a putt, he also focused on something having nothing to do with the sport.  “I admired a lot of the landscaping around the golf courses,” he recalls. In the late 1990s, when he and his wife Rory had some money left over from an insurance check to repair hail damage to their Kirkwood home, they decided to use it to enhance their own landscape.