The yard artist

It has taken nearly four decades, but Glenn Ray finally has his half-acre-plus property down to "9 minutes' worth of mowing."

The rest of Ray's Minnetonka yard is a sprawling, ever-so-subtly structured sanctuary befitting a man of his vocation and persona: professional landscaper with an artist's soul.

"A landscape garden is not a display of plants. It's a place to be entered, like a cathedral," Ray says. "It should be devised so that the moment you enter your space, you're exiting the rest of the world. You don't know you're in a suburb."

That sojourn begins at the back of your basic cul-de-sac, with a crowded but not crammed front yard laden with single plants that recur in unexpected places. Compact blue spruce, spiky Korean angelica, prehensile-looking hostas and boulders surrounded by sprawling rudbeckia or phlox frame narrow, serpentine paths.

All roads lead to a shady back yard that, upon first glance, appears to have little horticultural rhyme or reason. There are no rows or even swaths of plants. Urns and pots are strewn about, seemingly willy-nilly as the slope tumbles toward a wide pond.

But with every few steps, a sense of place unfolds.

"I love windows. I love peering through windows as you're walking," says Ray, a picture of lean fitness at 76, as we saunter around this horticultural preserve. One spot affords a peek at a small cannon almost hidden by ligularia. A nearby mini-patio, camouflaged until we are right upon it, is surrounded by ferns, sweet woodruff and the occasional allium, a small opening in front affording a chance to watch ducks land on the pond.

While designing and decorating his "rooms," Ray taps into his "manly" side, plus a literal sense of place. "Women value color. Men value shape, form," he says. "You want really beautiful form for a guy to look at.

"In Minnesota, form is definitely superior to color. There's no damn color here in winter. There are no plants that are beautiful in winter and ugly in summer. We are in Minnesota, people."

Advising and devising

In his professional life as owner of Masterpiece Landscaping Ltd., Ray puts aside his own preferences and focuses on the property, the size and shape of the house and yard -- to an extent, anyway. "I try to go, 'If I were living here, I would do this because of this,'" he says.

He likes to bring new clients to his own garden, "to show them 'This is what one guy has done,'" more to prod their imagination than to home in on a particular approach.

And it started, as these things so often do, in a sandbox.

"When I was 6 or 7, I would play with TootsieToy cars in the neighbor's sandbox," Ray recalls. "I stuck a piece of arborvitae in the sand and called it 'making scenery.' At that time I knew I had a notion of size relationship."

He was still playing in the sandbox at 13, "which really aggravated my mother," but during that stretch he also tended to his family's portion of a World War II "victory garden" that the city of St. Paul had set up in nearby Highland Park.

After college, Ray became a schoolteacher. When he bought the Minnetonka house in 1974, he started returning to his playing-in-the-dirt roots. "My goal in life was to live somewhere where I could create this," Ray says.

He planted a 40-by-80-foot vegetable garden out back "because I never wanted my kids to go to college not knowing where a tomato came from." Then he started landscaping around it.

Decades of trial and error ensued. "I had the dream. I had the feel. I had the eye. Where my embarrassments came was the choice of plants."

One project was abandoned for purely nonaesthetic reasons. "I used to love Russian olive trees. They lasted about five years, until one of the thorns got me in the elbow, and that was it."

All the while, Ray was working wonders on other people's properties. (Several of his Masterpiece Landscaping projects have been selected as winners in our Beautiful Gardens contest series.) He also had a long tenure as executive director of the Minnesota Horticultural Society.

He takes great pride in his business -- "I'm jealous of every garden that I've put in" -- but is more contemplative about the heaven's half-acre he has concocted at home.

"Gardening is the one art form that quiets your life," says a shirtless Ray, taking a swig of beer on a sultry summer afternoon. "The setting you see this very minute will never happen again. It's like ballet; that moment will never be repeated exactly in another performance."