Claire Schuchman loves how her 70-year-old brick house "sits on the land gently." Maybe that's why she has such a gentle touch in the garden.

Some might say that Mrs. Schuchman had it easy. The builder left her a wonderful hardscape: a unique small house whose backyard is delineated by a long brick walk, generous brick and flagstone patios, and a pond and fountain.

But consider that the two-thirds acre lot -- surprisingly large for suburban Mt. Lebanon -- was mostly overgrown when she and her husband, Jim, moved in 10 years ago. She spent two years "beating back the biosphere" in the words of one neighbor. That meant ripping out hundreds of wild roses in the back yard, pruning the usable shrubs and bringing some order to the chaos.

The result is a largely informal garden with some formal features that combines new cultivars and old favorites amid towering oaks and other mature hardwood trees. It is a co-winner in the large category of the 2008 Great Gardens Contest.

Among the prizes in the annual competition, sponsored by the Post-Gazette and Botanic Garden of Western Pennsylvania, is a pair of tickets to next year's Open Garden Day tour and a gift certificate to Brenckles Nursery.

For this garden designer, that's a little like letting loose a kid in a candy store, except this kid knows her way around. She already has some of the most popular new plants:

'September Charm' Japanese anemone, 'Rozanne' perennial geranium, 'Superba' astilbe, 'Stairway to Heaven' Jacob's ladder and 'Hadspen Cream' Brunnera.

The last one, a shade-loving ground cover, has tiny light blue flowers in the spring and variegated heart-shaped leaves. But in Mrs. Schuchman's beds, it's outshone by the species Brunnera macrophylla, whose lustrous dark green leaves function both as a foil to the variegated 'Stairway to Heaven' and as an eye-rest among jazzier plants.

Besides, 'Hadspen Cream' is a "water hog," Mrs. Schuchman says, which is why it's planted close to the hose bib.

Some of the garden's most striking effects come from massing well-known plants such as 'Annabelle' smooth hydrangea, swamp azalea and ostrich ferns. Actually, the ferns were there long before the Schuchmans, filling the slope on one side of the pond. There were so many that Mrs. Schuchman once thinned out about 50 of them "and you couldn't even tell."

Until this summer, the pond didn't work. The natural spring that originally fed it dried up when surrounding streets were developed. The couple opened the original drain, patched and painted the concrete bowl and added a new pump to the old fountain.

"Soon after we turned it on, baby robins and blue jays found it," Mrs. Schuchman said.

Although she has instinctively gardened most of her life (her parents were both gardeners), she has been a designer for only three years. She took classes at Community College of Allegheny County and through the Phipps Garden Center to become a master gardener. Mrs. Schuchman has designed and planted her side and rear garden but hired Gregg Friday to do the front. At the time she hired him because she wanted a fresh eye.

"I got so lost in the details. I was like a doctor working on his own family," she says.