Each season the Pages’ garden brings new discoveries of exuberant flowers, rotating artwork, flea-market finds, canteen birdhouses and humor. Photos by Greg Roller.


A blue bed frame and a plot of pansies make for quirky bedfellows.

It’s not unusual to find a fairy or two crouching amid the daylilies. Photo by Dan Page.


An upturned-bicycle trellis adds momentum and expands the garden skyward. Photo by Dan Page.


Neighbors gather in front of the caboose for the Pages’ annual pumpkin-carving festival. Last year, the couple’s homegrown pumpkins weighed in at 275 pounds; they’re hoping for 300-pounders this fall.

Personalized Pursuits

You don’t have to be an artist to unleash your creativity in the garden. Here are a few ways to personalize your outdoor space: Start small. Embed a favorite memento into a concrete steppingstone (there are many how-to guides for this on the Internet). Etch in the year for posterity’s sake. Projects like this make you smile each time you walk past them. Don’t think permanent. Some items you’d love in the garden don’t last outside for long. Tiles crack, wood warps, paint fades, but don’t let that deter you. Think of impermanent items as carefully crafted sand sculptures that can be whisked away in the tide. Like a beach swept clean, your garden will be ready for the next object you love. Change things around. “Our son has his own garden he retools each year,” says Boulder gardener Dan Page. “This year, it’s the surface of Mars covered in red annuals, with a glowing red orb. A couple years ago, he turned it into a pizza. Watching his garden evolve each year reminds us of each stage of his childhood.” Go for nostalgia. Maybe you love heirloom plants, old farm implements or totem poles. Whatever you fancy, adapt it for use in your garden. Recycle sports gear. Skis, ski boots, bicycles and golf clubs are as much a part of Boulder County’s heritage as flagstone and wildflowers, so why not plant them in the garden when they’ve outlived their original usefulness? If you’re not a sports enthusiast, explore your passions—a retired telescope can make a great support for hyacinth beans. Think tall. Upturned bicycles and bedspring trellises offer welcome support to meandering vines. They also expand your garden upward. —John Thompson

Sowing Whimsy and Wonder

Tucked between the grand blooms in this Boulder garden are some amusing surprises.

by John Thompson

To most people, a garden project might involve just cutting back the Russian sage or reseeding the lawn. Not to Dan and Kim Page. On their acre plot, you’ll find thousands of flowers and a handful of surprises, like a purple door that opens to a path of amaranths, zinnias and sunflowers; a window suspended over a pumpkin patch; cobalt-colored bedsprings draped in morning glories; and upturned-bicycle garden pillars.

“It’s sort of like cottage gardening meets Salvador Dalí,” Dan says of their whimsical plot in southeast Boulder. When the Pages bought their home in 2000, they’d searched three years for a property with a rural feel and ample land to garden. They also wanted a place where their ’76 Chevy pickup could “look at home in the yard,” Dan says. He’s not kidding. Along with the pickup, the Pages’ garden houses a fire truck and a caboose, which they set in the garden with a crane.

Whimsy wasn’t the original intention for their garden, Kim insists. In fact, their first gardening project was straight out of a book: building a white picket fence. But the pair quickly grew bored with tradition. “It was just too cute,” Kim says of the fence. After some pondering (and a couple margaritas, Dan adds), the couple decided the pickets shouldn’t be symmetrical. Following a few rounds with the jigsaw, the pickets now mirror an ocean wave that gains momentum as your eyes sweep across the fence.

The picket project unleashed a flood of creativity, and garden “projects” are now a preoccupation of the Pages. “We’re always looking around for things that amuse us—garage sale items, flea market treasures, Internet finds,” Kim says. The Pages also frequent ReSource for recycled building materials they can adapt to the garden, including the purple door (with an operable doorbell).

“We store half the stuff inside the caboose until we get the right inspiration for it,” Dan says. For example, a vintage washing machine found at a garage sale now sits in their garden and houses an alligator’s head. “It’s amazing what you can find on eBay,” Kim says.

Not surprisingly, the Pages’ garden always attracts attention. “People have gotten out of their cars to thank us, because our garden made them smile,” Kim says. The caboose is a hit, of course, but many of the garden’s other features change year to year, and even season to season. When last winter’s blizzard struck, Dan thought Santa pushing a sleigh through the snow would be a nice addition. The yard has also hosted bicycling scarecrows, fairy portraits, metal animals, ski-boot birdhouses and other oddities. “I’ve had people ask where to pay the admission fee,” Dan says with a laugh. “They think it’s an amusement park.”

Plants ’n’ Projects
While their garden may amuse, it’s not all fun and games for the Pages. When they first landscaped the property, they spent a solid three months removing rocks. Then they hauled in tons of compost and a couple-thousand pounds of coffee grounds, and doused the poorest soil in liberal doses of loam, followed by TLC and more loam. Because the soil was so substandard, it could sustain only annuals for the first few years. The task of planting such a large space anew each year didn’t discourage the Pages, however. “There was always a bounty of bright color,” Kim says, “and it gave us the ability to change the garden’s configuration and plantings each season.”

At the end of fall, the Pages plow under their plot and add several trailer loads of leaves and cut grass. In spring, they till again and add coffee-bean chaff for its phosphorous content. “It smells like Starbucks for a couple weeks,” Dan says. “It’s a good time to walk by if you’re a caffeine addict.”

The couple spends winters poring over books and drawings to plan the next season’s plantings and projects. But one species is a mainstay: brilliant, multi­colored zinnias. The Pages purchase about 100,000 seeds of these flowers each year. The tall, long-lasting blooms attract so many hummingbirds, bumblebees, butterflies and goldfinches that “the bed looks like it’s moving” when everything is flowering, Dan says.

Other dazzling plants include ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ amaranths, ‘Bright Lights’ cosmos, and scores of sunflowers and yellow and orange calendulas. “These are all great performers that reseed each year, although not always where we want them,” Dan says, “so we just move them around.” The garden also boasts towering castor bean, grown for its exotic foliage, and an abundance of 4-foot-tall yellow and orange marigolds, from which the couple extracts pounds of seeds each year.

In addition to these plants (and thousands of others), scarlet runner bean and vivid purple hyacinth bean curl up the fences and wrap around a trellis made of golf clubs. The couple also leaves a spot for Atlantic dill vines.

Two years ago, they planted giant pumpkins for the first time. “We didn’t work at it all that hard and ended up with several 300-hundred-pounds-plus pumpkins,” Dan says. Last year, a September frost stunted the pumpkins’ growth to about 275 pounds, but the couple hopes for a banner crop this year. “We’re determined to grow the largest pumpkins in Boulder County,” Dan says. The couple even hosts an annual pumpkin-carving festival for neighborhood kids.

As they eagerly await this fall’s pumpkins, Dan is forging ahead with a new garden project: assembling a clock tower inspired by the works of Salvador Dalí. But Kim is wondering why she caught Dan googling “taxidermy” on the Internet. “That worries me a little,” she says with a smile. “We’ll just have to wait and see what comes up.”

Longtime Boulder resident John Thompson typically writes fiction, but spending time in the Pages’ garden inspired him to write this piece.

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