Joyce Yasko and Lee Dyer are justifiably proud of the blooming perennials, trees and shrubs that surround their grand Queen Anne-style house in Evans City. But the plant they're most excited about this year has no colorful flowers, shapely form or distinctive foliage. It's their lush green lawn.

"Isn't it beautiful? Do you remember how horrible it looked last year?" asked Ms. Yasko.

Last summer, when the couple were finalists in the 2007 Great Gardens Contest, the lawn had many burned-out spots when judges from the Post-Gazette and Botanic Garden of Western Pennsylvania visited. Fed up, Ms. Yasko and Mr. Dyer called in Steve Lawson of Lawson Landscape.

In the fall, the contractor killed the grass with Round-Up, removed the dead turf, leveled out some spots, spread mushroom manure and seeded. This spring, the lawn grew in thick and dark green with not a weed in sight. It's a beautiful carpet and perfect backdrop for the curving beds that surround the spectacular white Victorian house with pink and light blue trim.

The 4,200-square-foot house and attached antiques shop, Antiques Preferred, was much plainer, with overgrown landscaping, when the couple bought it in the spring of 1998. For the first two years, they focused on the house. Then they turned to the nearly three-quarter-acre garden. Ms. Yasko is the mistress of the flower beds while Mr. Dyer focuses on heirloom vegetables out back. Together, they chose many small trees and shrubs, including Japanese willow, Japanese and other kinds of maples, Bradford pear, apple, cherry, flowering and kousa dogwoods, smokebush, lilac and forsythia.

Pink and white dogwoods anchor a bed that stretches down one long side of the corner lot. Pink, white, light blue and yellow irises -- each blooming at a different time -- flow into stands of daylilies, phlox, snow-in-summer, four o'clocks, coral bells and other old-fashioned perennials. Beds closer to the house hew to its blue, pink and white palette and are filled with foxglove, larkspur, bluebells, phlox, hydrangea and fritillary. Pink and white peony bushes grow within a hedge.

Ms. Yasko said she tries to use mostly plants popular at the time the house was built -- 1888-89. When asked the name of one tall, dark pink flower, she laughed.

"Those are weeds, but they are the prettiest weeds you'll ever see!" she said, adding that she got them from a friend.

"I learn by trial and error and by talking to other gardeners. People are better than any garden book."

Each year, her garden has at least one "infestation" -- her name for a plant that takes over a section of a bed. This year, it is a purple-blue Stokes' aster that she bought from a catalog a couple years ago. One year, it was ferns that crowded out hostas growing near the front porch. The only annuals she buys are geraniums and dianthus.

In Mr. Dyer's vegetable garden, he grows heirloom tomatoes, several kinds of lettuce and peppers, cantaloupe and watermelon ("for our grandchildren.") When the children visit from Georgia, Maryland, New York, Squirrel Hill and Fox Chapel, they find a few melons to eat and lots to see and do. Previous generations have played basketball in the two-story attic that was once a theater.

The house's builder and first owner, Gustave Griesbach, was an arts-loving butcher turned oilman who founded Griesbach Oil Co. in 1890 and later served on Evans City's school board and borough council. His sons Gustivas and Clyde were skilled in theater makeup and dance, respectively, according to Earle C. King, who sold the house in 1992 to Connie and Kathy Kost, who sold it to Ms. Yasko and Mr. Dyer in 1998.

A house history by Mr. King inspired the current owners to organize a reunion last summer of people who had lived in the house. Nearly 30 people from as far away as California and Arizona came for a weekend of shared stories and photos. Each also found antiques from his or her home states in the house, where the couple have pieces from all 50 states and six countries.

The house is filled from top to bottom with such conversation pieces as the late 1800s gramophone that Ms. Yasko's grandfather brought over from Serbia in his lap. The couple are also caretakers of a few antiques in the garden -- a Concord grapevine with a 6-inch-thick trunk that fills an old iron arbor with grapes each fall and a panicle hydrangea that has become a 15-foot-tall tree. Ms. Yasko said she almost lost it a couple years ago but with the help of landscaper Ed Schleiden, they brought it back to life. It rewards them each summer with large clusters of white petals that turn pink, then tan in the fall.

"It's been a labor of love," she said.