BEULAH - Lori Brecht of Golden Valley picked up a shovel 10 years ago and hasn't put it away since.

Her yard - half of a generous block at the edge of this country village - has been gradually transformed into a work of landscape art.

Brecht has the dirt under her fingernails and the shovel calluses to go along with it.

Her garden, with swaths of showy purple salvia accented by the deep gold of flowering sedum, was featured in the Beulah Garden Club's 2009 summer tour.

There were five gardens on the tour, three in Beulah and two outside town.

Driving west to Brecht's in Golden Valley and on up to Carla Morast's garden north of Zap was an unadvertised bonus; a countryside tour of nature's green garden, mown hay lush in the fields all beneath the bowl of a blue, blue sky.

Each garden is as different as the property and the gardener herself.

What's the same is the passion for the beauty and contemplative moments that go with creating it.

"I've been in the dirt all my life," says Brecht. "The flowers took over."

She keeps a long, alphabetized list of everything growing in her yard. It covers one page and part of another.

Birds flit everywhere overhead and a pair of doves startles out of a shady garden behind the house, where roses and columbine add simplicity and color.

"People say you're supposed to coordinate colors, but mother nature isn't color coordinated. I don't have any straight lines either," Brecht said.

What she has is profusion and plenty of space to let spreading plants spread and brick-lined paths wander.

What she loves most is no particular place in the garden yard, just quiet moments to listen to birdsong.

Morast's country garden is a jewel in a beautiful setting.

The surrounding hills and woody draws are an exquisite backdrop to the more formal gardens Morast has slowly developed over the years.

"We moved here into a pasture. I got obsessed," she admits.

She enjoys her day job, but says she does it partly so she can afford to buy the plants, pots and gardening supplies that give her so much pleasure all spring and summer long.

"I'm out here at 6 a.m.," she says. The next hour or so - day if she has it - disappear into a quiet, personal time with nature.

Her home is fronted by a full-length porch, with dozens of hanging baskets, dripping with flowers, and made comfortable with padded wicker chairs and furniture settings.

She shares perennial plants, gets them from others and saves and orders flower seed.

Morast picks through rock piles and junk piles for treasures that outline beds and add quirky accents to the daylilies and dozens of other perennial and annuals she cultivates.

Kathy Kelsch, who lives in a relatively new home on the west side of Beulah, has a secret gardening weapon in her husband, Bryan Tomchuck.

The couple has hauled in field stone and landscape blocks to turn a steep slope from a walk-out lower level into a terraced feature filled with plants and flowers.

Kelsch especially likes hostas and anemones, both hardy plants that tolerate shade or sun.

Her terraced stairway on this hillside lot is lined with "grass of Ireland," a unique ground cover that looks like moss and feels like plush green carpet under bare feet.

Ruth Sailer and Alma Conlon have been gardening for years in a more traditional way that included the necessary family vegetable garden.

Today, Conlon lives in a retirement condominium in Beulah and her gardening is restrained to borders along the patio, house and driveway.

She is proof that it doesn't take much space to make beauty.

A special feature in her border garden is the old garden gate from back on the farm which she says recalls so many cool summer mornings working while her children were still dreaming in bed. She would weed and hoe, all the while listening for the squeak of the gate to tell her they were awake and looking for her for their day to begin.

A clematis plant, with its large purple blossoms, climbs the gate. The clematis was originally her own mother's and she has had it now for 35 years.

Conlon says for her a garden is all about hope.

A gardener is hopeful about which plants will return after the winter, whether the hydrangea will like its sunny corner, whether the morning glory will climb over the rock as planned, she says.

And if a garden is about hope, it can also be about pleasure, perhaps of the sort that only a gardener with dirt under her nails and a smudge across a sweaty forehead can understand.

"I love to walk here and pick a few weeds," says Conlon. "There's no work to it, really."

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 701-748-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)