Dallas Bergstrom’s cell phone seems to ring about every five minutes, which isn’t surprising because his contacts in the Lawrence area have skyrocketed in the past few years. The landscaper recently has tackled such high-profile ventures as the Adams Alumni Center’s new outdoor facelift, Hutton Farms’ sprawling community living area and Fall Creek Farms’ entryway.

Bergstrom also recently finished an indoor rain forest in Topeka and is commissioned to create a flora fantasy for one of the larger homes that flank Ward Parkway in Kansas City.

The project list is impressive, considering the landscaper’s home and business are based in Clay Center, about 120 miles west of Lawrence.

“I work a lot in Kansas City and in Lawrence, but I live in Clay Center,” Bergstrom says. “It is difficult with three kids and my wife, but we get by.”

Bergstrom received his first job in Lawrence three years ago; a lovely Tudor-style home that sits just west of campus on Crescent Road was his muse. The garden was in shambles, with brambly hillsides of vines and weeds and a sloping yard as the canvas. About 60,000 bricks were unearthed in the restoration process, and four semi-trailer loads of rotted, old railroad ties were dug up and hauled away. For most people it would have been nearly impossible to imagine what could be.

“We knew we wanted to come in with stone retaining walls to help with the sloping yard,” Bergstrom says. “Because of the lay of the land, every single item had to be hand-carried. We brought in stone by stone over 120 tons in total; all of the paths were created by the bricks we unearthed in the demolition process. It took a total of four months to complete this garden landscape.”

But what an oasis it is, with large 8-foot slabs of limestone heeled into the south hillside as an impromptu stairway that leads up to the rose garden, which is full of knockouts and tea rose varieties. The water garden is made of sandstone that is tinted red; it boasts four or five waterfalls and glows in the evening with more than 120 lights to lead the way in the dark. The six semi-trailer loads of limestone are used repetitively throughout the entire garden, leading a viewer’s eye from one elevated bed to the next. The hillside, which only had a smattering of overgrown, unkempt trees, has been transformed in to an area with fantastic design elements of curving lines, a porch swing dangling from a tree and a dollhouse built to human scale for the homeowners’ four daughters. More than 10,000 ivy liners have taken root on the lower hillside.

One of the elements in this garden that is as crucial as any flora are the hardscapes, which beckon a visitor to follow this path or peek around that tree. Most of the stone already has a heavy blanket of moss and lichens that have spread in the three short years the garden has had to mature, lending a much older feel to the landscape.

Bergstrom wanted to stress a fully seasonal garden, and with his use of boxwoods, Japanese maples, tiger eye sumac, ornamental grasses, pines, liriope, English ivy, stone, brick and a magnificent water feature, this outdoor playground is truly for any season.

“The design part of landscaping is a great satisfaction,” Bergstrom says. “But really, from beginning to end, I like the entire process. In fact, it really takes awhile to ‘come down’ from a job – like this was four months’ work in my life, and it takes a couple of months to stop thinking about a project that you put so much into.”