By Kathleen McCormick

	In the allée, paperbark maples (Acer griseum) provide color, texture, and sculptural form year-round, especially in winter, when their delicate peeling bark captures snowflakes. Landscape Architect: Garr Campbell Garr Campbell Associates 12 West Market Street, Suite 280 Salt Lake City 84101

For over 20 years, Victoria Jane Ream, a master gardener, community leader, and world traveler, developed fabulous gardens on her 1.5-acre property, located at the foot of Lone Peak in Utah’s Salt Lake Valley. But for all those years, she felt major elements weren’t right. So six years ago, she had her property bulldozed right up to the contemporary redwood, stone, and glass house. The new landscape is a garden for all seasons.

Victoria called in Garr Campbell, a renowned landscape architect in Salt Lake and a distant relative. She asked Campbell to create a four-season landscape that she could enjoy from every room in her house. They collaborated to create a garden with “good bones” provided by three elements: hardscape such as walls, patios, and paths; trees and shrubs that provide year-round color, form, and texture; and an understory of roses and bulbs.

All of these elements come together in a 75-foot allée of paperbark maples. Located above a new dry-stack retaining wall built of New Hampshire blue fieldstone, the gravel path of the allée leads from a pergola attached to the house down to the driveway. Strolling through this passageway allows glimpses below to a lawn and cutting garden with espaliered fruit trees. When she’s not actually out in the garden working, Victoria enjoys observing the seasonal changes from the large windows in her office.

Diverse trees and shrubs ensure that views of the allée are always intriguing. A big California redwood with lacy needles punctuates the end of this path near the driveway. Shrubby hollies, cedars of Lebanon, miniature mugo pines, variegated dogwood, and a red-leafed Japanese maple add the contrasting color and texture.

The paperbark maples, celebrated for their ornamental bark, are particularly beautiful every season. They form a green canopy over spring-blooming tulips and irises, huge purple allium, and Miss Kim lilacs; summer’s white roses, pink phlox, and blue salvia; and Autumn Joy sedum. “Just the structure of the Acer griseum in the allée, with that wonderful peeling-bark effect, makes it particularly interesting in the winter,” notes Campbell.

“In winter, when the leaves are off, you really see the skeleton of the garden,” says Victoria. “I love it most of all in the very early spring, when the limey green of plants first freshens up. It is the shape and the form of green.”