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“Gardening is an extension of your home; it’s decorating the outside,” says Amy Alfeld. For the past 12 years that’s just what Amy and Philip Alfeld of Godfrey, Illinois, have been doing. A Chippendale-style wooden front gate that incorporates the crisscross design of the British Union Jack sets the tone for the garden that surrounds “Corgi Cottage,” the home the Alfelds have lovingly named for their two dogs. The gate, set into a picket fence, serves as the backdrop for a cottage-garden-style display of spring bulbs and colorful summer perennials, with Russian sage, yellow cone-flowers and daylilies bordering the enclosed front yard. The British/American ambiance of the landscaping extends to the back of the property and the custom-built, wood-shingled garden shed – accented in Williamsburg-style, with a hammered-tin lantern and an earthenware bottle birdhouse.

It’s a garden that perfectly complements their brick, federal-style home, filled with antiques, oil paintings and British and Colonial American memorabilia. It’s no accident that Amy, who restores oil paintings, and Philip, an attorney, revel in 18th century Americana. Philip numbers among his ancestors the bricklayers and carpenters who laid the foundations of Colonial Williamsburg. The period is truly in his blood. The love of that era is echoed by Amy. The couple travels once each year to both Williamsburg and England. “We’ve toured all the great gardens of England,” says Philip. “I see gardens as part of Anglo-American history and culture.”“I knew 15 minutes after I saw this house that I was buying it,” Amy recalls, “and I knew what I was going to do with the garden. We basically came here and lost our minds.”

The scope of the yard that measures over 100 feet across and 300 feet deep was definitely mind-boggling for the Alfelds, who were used to gardening on a totally different scale. “We’d lived in downtown Alton and had a postage-stamp-sized backyard. Our garden was a New Orleans-style courtyard,” explains Amy. When we moved, all that was here were tall trees, lawn and a swimming pool that was 100 feet from the house and surrounded by a chain-link fence. A skinny strip of concrete sidewalk connected the house with the pool. It was the ugliest pool I’ve ever seen,” she notes with a laugh.

Understanding design but knowing little about plants, Amy truly went to work. “I knew that a garden was a collection of living things, and you have to make them happy so they survive,” she points out. To obtain firsthand experience, she called a friend who owns The Greenery, a Godfrey nursery, and ended up working there for three years.

Working with Amy’s growing knowledge of plants (what Philip calls a “substantial library of gardening books”) and rich Illinois soil that had at various times been used for crops and horses, the garden took shape. One of the first things the couple did was create a formal boxwood garden, crisscrossed with brick walks, between the house and the pool. “I decided that if you are going to the pool you might was well pass through beauty to get there,” Amy explained. Although the boxwood garden is easily visible from the brick patio directly behind the house, the pool is not. Another early gardening decision was to screen the pool from the rest of the yard with a mixed hedge of boxwood, yew, arborvitae and juniper.

To the left of the pool and boxwood garden, a stepping-stone path leads through a shade garden lined with dogwoods, Japanese maples, serviceberries, azaleas, rhododendrons and hostas, then reemerges into the sun. This new area of the garden includes a wave-petunia-filled circular flower bed centered with a Victorian urn; there is a Williamsburg-style garden shed, and, behind the shed, a geometrically laid out kitchen garden filled with vegetables and herbs and centered with a sundial.

Directly behind the pool and connected by a brick walk, a lattice-covered gazebo, lit at night by a candle-burning chandelier,highlights the garden. The gazebo, technically known as a belvedere due to its multiple entrances, is copied from one at Wakefield, the re-creation of George Washington’s birthplace in northern Virginia. On the side of the garden opposite the shed,a brass, multi-ringed armillary, once used in astronomical observations, centers another garden bed. “We bought it just because it was beautiful,” says Amy. The return pathway to the house traverses a shade garden along the other side of the pool and passes Amy’s garage art studio.

While that might seem like enough garden space, one of the loveliest areas of the yard is to the side of the house. It’s explored via a curving brick walk that leads through a second Chippendale gate. The gate serves as a portal to a lush, cool shade garden highlighted with flowering trees, hydrangeas and hostas. Tucked into the area’s picket fencing, a roofed corner bench, built from plans the Alfelds found in a 1938 do-it-yourself instruction manual, provides a view of the space.

One of Amy’s goals in designing the garden was to create multiple venues. “You can’t see everything in one shot,” she points out. “You can almost get lost here; we’ve added a little mystery. It’s a little less than three quarters of an acre, but you think you’ve walked through three acres.”