Imagine a little girl tagging along behind her grandfather in the garden. "Look at this flower," he says. "Doesn't it look like a little lady in a bathtub?"

Most people think Dicentra spectabilis looks like a bleeding heart, its common name. But who's to argue if Judy Missell, like her grandfather, sees a pink bathing beauty in a porcelain tub?

No wonder that little girl grew into a gardener who surrounds herself with deep, curving beds flowing with shrubs and perennials. The runner-up in the small garden category of the Post-Gazette's annual Great Gardens contest can't imagine gardening any other way, and wonders why more people don't do it.

"People don't know -- or they don't dare -- to experiment," she says. "You can always move it."

In 1996, she and her husband, John, moved to a Tudor-style house in Mt. Lebanon made from fieldstone. They were drawn to it because it was unique and its garden was, essentially, a blank slate. The front yard included a rhododendron, some azaleas and two large pine trees. The back yard was a fenced-in patch of dirt and threadbare grass that was losing the battle to dogs and shade from a giant locust tree infested with ants.

Cutting down the tree created space for her first bed, a large one that curls around a flagstone patio.

"Wouldn't it be nice to have an enclosed area to eat?" the couple said to each other after a visit to the gardens at Clayton, Henry Clay Frick's Victorian estate in Point Breeze.

So, they began hauling carloads of shrubs and perennials from their old house in Loudonville, N.Y., filling that bed and others with roses, Russian sage, irises, hostas and lady's mantle (there's that lady again). For spring color, Mrs. Missell planted bleeding hearts in honor of her late grandpa, Carlton Landers of Portland, Maine.

In the front and back, she created more beds. Sometimes using a hose for guidance, other times relying on her eye alone, she cut dramatic curves into her husband's new grass. Mr. Missell, an architect, was not pleased.

"He said I was taking up too much of the lawn," she says, "and the curves were cut too deeply. I had to do it when he wasn't around."

Mr. Missell was her only critic in the back, where no one else could see. But in the front yard, neighbors were already starting to wonder about the garden lady who couldn't cut straight.

When Mrs. Missell filled a large round bed in the middle of the lawn with Russian sage, a red Midland rose and lamb's ear, a neighbor across the street couldn't hold her tongue any longer.

"Do you know what you're doing?" she asked desperately.

Mrs. Missell, whose expertise comes mainly from experience and garden magazines, knew exactly what she was doing. And it had nothing to do with the boring square hedges and neatly edged grass that dominate many Mt. Lebanon yards. She was creating a lightly pruned tapestry of purple, blue and white with one red rose bush as an accent.

Ornamental grass follows a curve that ends in a swath of blue hydrangea. Purple asters and groundcover roses, phlox, dahlias, alyssum and impatiens -- all white -- overflow several beds. And by the front walk, pink and purple-leaved barberry provide a colorful but thorny welcome. A sidewalk is probably not the best place for fast-growing barberry, Mrs. Missell admits.

"It's better to let them go about their business."

Mrs. Missell is not opposed to pruning. She cuts back the barberry and a purple-flowered weigela that could overwhelm a front bed. She hacks back a purple wisteria that has hidden and may topple an arbor in the back. She also prunes the New Dawn climbing rose and climbing hydrangea that are in a race up the stone wall in the back. The hydrangea's lacy white blooms are repeated in white impatiens and peace plants that spill from large urns on a shady side patio and back steps.

In the 11 years the couple has lived here, the transplants from their old garden and a former summer home in Massachusetts have been joined by many others bought at local nurseries such as Iannetti's, Jim Jenkins, South Hills, Bedner's, Friday's and a plant auction in Rogers, Ohio.

Among the plants that have been divided and moved until they found a happy spot are bellflowers, silver lace vine, white and purple phlox, zebra grass, cleome, elephant's ear, bugloss and ostrich and Japanese painted ferns.

A village of birdhouses has sprung up around a pond dug by Mr. Missell and their 15-year-old son, James.

Finally, the garden lady has won over her critics. Her husband likes the curving beds and her son and daughter Catherine, 26, admire what their mother has created.

Even the neighbors sometimes ask if they can bring over friends to see the garden. And the woman who asked if Mrs. Misell knew what she was doing? She has since moved. But before she left, she asked for advice on what to plant in her boring front yard. Take a chance, the garden lady told her.

"If you like a plant, do it in masses. It makes more of a statement than a lot of perennials."

And if you really want to make a statement, go natural, as natural as taking a bath.