To ensure that the front yard of their new home in Grand Junction, Colorado, possessed a welcoming quality, Bob and Nancy Hackett enlisted the aid of landscape architect Bob Arcieri.

Like open arms, colorful planting beds flank a wide walkway that leads to a covered front porch whose pillars are festooned with English ivy. The beds are filled with flowering ground covers such as Ajuga reptans and Potentilla verna, hardy shrubs like Japanese barberry and Yucca filamentosa (with creamy white blooms at far right), clumps of blue fescue, and long-blooming flowers like daylilies and pansies.

On one side of the garden, a small sliver of lawn is wedged between a flower bed and a dry creek bed edged by boulders. To accent the rear of the garden, Arcieri used upright and weeping varieties of flowering cherry trees that can tolerate the relatively mild winters in Grand Junction.

For designing and installing the garden, Arcieri and Bookcliff Gardens of Grand Junction won a joint merit award in the 1999 Excellence in Landscape competition sponsored by the Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado.