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The couple purchased an oversize golf cart to give guests guided tours of the property. "There's an old adage that goes: 'Creating your own garden is wonderful, but wouldn't it be great if you could get your neighbor's garden, too?' That hit us." —Donna LaPietra the stuff," admits LaPietra. But the chainsaw was equally untenable. "We could only go as far as the power cord did," she says. They finally gave in and hired professionals to clear the land, and called on noted landscape architect Craig Bergmann for help with a master plan that would realize their vision. Bergmann is known for his expertise in design and installation, as well as the deft and original way he wields plant materials. The couple wanted to begin by focusing on the sunken lawn, which they wanted to look like the exquisite gardens they had seen on their many trips to England. The 140-foot-long, 80-foot-wide space was edged with new walls exe- cuted in handsome red bricks and revived with sumptuous perennial borders that flanked the long walls and ended in a rose enclave at its far end. There, they used an antique Venetian marble wellhead, one of the only Victorian whimsies that remained from the original gardens, to anchor a parterre of four crisply clipped boxwood frames filled with lav- ishly scented David Austin roses, which fronts a picturesque wrought-iron gate that gives way to a larger landscape beyond. n the process of transforming the lawn into the grand ballroom of alfresco rooms, LaPietra and Kurtis became passionate gardeners as well as land stewards. And like many gardeners before them, they experienced a very specific kind of land lust. "There's an old adage that goes, 'Creating your own garden is wonderful, but wouldn't it be great if you could get your neighbor's garden, too?' That hit us," says LaPietra. This revelation inspired them to increase their hold- ings and place all of I their new acquisitions into conservation easements for perpetuity. "None of the [parcels of land] can be developed into shopping malls or subdivisions, though they can be sold," says Kurtis. "They must remain open lands forever." Over the next 15 years, they acquired another 59 acres for a total of 68. One of them included a house to the north of Mettawa Manor that had also been owned by the Covington family, and a greenhouse. The for- mer became the Kurtis Conservation Foundation to headquarter their ongoing preservation efforts and house educational programming, while the latter became a hard-working addition to the estate for plant propagation and wintering. With more land came more alfresco "rooms" to com- plement the magical sunken garden, and a wealth of "territories" left in a more natural state. Slowly, and with the help of staff horticulturist Kathleen Reynolds, they created a variety of gardens with specific colors and themes, a potager, a fire pit edged with a labyrinth, sev- eral different ponds, an arboretum, an aqua theatre of LaPietra's design, and larger zones that include an orchard, a grove, a meadow, woodlands, and the prairie that attracts their coveted fireflies. With old- fashioned elbow grease, Kurtis restored dislodged rocks that had fallen into the pond to their proper place at its edge.