Even though they are on a corner lot, Andrew Caughey and Shelly Neitzel wanted the side yard patio of their Ann Arbor home to be private and to have the feeling of being a world away from the hustle and bustle.

“They wanted the patio concealed from the street, but they didn’t want to enclose it so much that it was claustrophobic,” said certified landscape designer Tom Stempky, owner of Stempky Gardens.

So Stempky set out to create a garden that would blend with the Ives Woods neighborhood of stately homes but offer an Eden-like respite. He installed a patio of New York bluestone and surrounded it with common and collector item plantings, from a yellow dawn redwood, a feathery conifer with limey green new growth, to the dependable and long-flowering kousa dogwood.

It was one of six gardens on the recent 21st annual Ann Arbor Garden Walk, sponsored by the Ann Arbor branch of the Women’s National Farm & Garden Association.

Today’s fine gardens include three elements, Stempky said: Color, texture and variety. Some of that variety comes from including showpieces in the landscape, collector items not found in most gardens.

Stempky incorporated a number of surprises in the garden that encloses the patio:

• A whimsical blue atlas cedar, a grafted plant that looks as much like a piece of art as a plant. Its color matches the bluestone patio and breaks the vertical growth of the garden by adding a horizontal element.

• An Acer pseudoplatanus Eskimo Sunset tree with a speckled-leaf, it is a cross between a sycamore and a maple. Its orange-pink leaves of spring mature into green leaves splashed with cream and pink as the season progresses.

• A Korean fir, native to the higher mountains of Korea, with compact purple cones.

• A small kitchen garden just outside the back door gives a nod to functional gardening, offering herbs and tomatoes.

• An ornamental peach tree, with its burgundy leaves, tops out at a modest five or six feet. It occupies a corner of the garden, with a bed of lime and orange heuchera at its feet, creating a rainbow of color in a small space.

The couple also wanted to attract humming birds and butterflies Stempky said, so he included the perennials crocosmia, a member of the iris family; Echinacea, also called purple coneflower and delphinium, known’s for its regal blue color.

In other areas of the garden, Stempky leaned toward tradition by including old-fashioned favorites such as hydrangeas, lilacs, Cantebury bells and bachelor buttons.

The front garden blends in with the neighborhood, with large mounding hostas and Japanese painted ferns accompanied by popular heuchera (coral bells) in the shade and Emerald Spreader Japanese yews under a giant shade tree. There is a tricolor beech, a flowering crabapple and Exbury azaleas that bloom orange in the spring. Orange has become a popular garden color, Stempky said.

Stempky, former landscaper for pizza magnate Tom Monaghan for 3-1/2 years, learned the Frank Lloyd Wright school of garden design.

“It’s not rocket science. When you make a garden, you invite the outside in,” he said.

A good garden can be appreciated from the outside and from the inside, he said. “It should be integrated into the house setting.”

Wright also influenced the outside of the garden. A curving path of ground up black slate stone imported from Pennsylvania runs behind the Ives Woods house.

Paths, according to the Wright way of thinking, should mimic a riverbed, Stempky said. The path runs through ground cover on one side and a bed of hostas, ornamental grasses and astilbe on the other.