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.

Rodney Jarboe didn’t start out to create a movie set in his back yard. When he and his wife Regina purchased a nearly two-acre lot in a Town and Country subdivision 25 years ago, they looked at the level terrain and were thinking of a lovely swimming pool and maybe a tennis court.

More specifically, the bubbling, splashing, gurgling sound of rushing water is the stuff of daily curtain calls. The stage set is green and glowing; filled with daffodils and dogwoods in spring and ferns, sedum and astilbe in summer. Shrubs such as sumac, boxwood, viburnum, hydrangea and creeping juniper provide a constant backdrop and the fall color is spectacular.

Mark Kalk and his partner Mark Lammert had a problem. More succinctly, it was a landscaping problem. They needed to fit a large garden full of native plants and flowing water into a much smaller space. The reason why goes back a few years.

In 2010, then living in Compton Heights, they assembled four adjacent parcels of land into a one-third-acre site in iconic Lafayette Square, where they had once lived and still had friends. On that lot, they built a large, red brick townhome.

Marcella Hawley had spent her entire life around beautiful flowers. But until she planted her own beds in Webster Groves, she had no idea of the healing power of a garden.

With April showers come spring flowers, and the abundance of colorful blooms are sure to spark inspiration in the kitchen. For many gardeners, eating from the garden means eating vegetables such as tomatoes, carrots or cucumbers, but it doesn’t have to stop there! Edible flowers are a great way to incorporate color into your everyday meals.