Garden design blooms when the client allows the designer to nudge them—just a little. When a Kansas City couple enlisted Kristopher Dabner, owner of The Greensman, to transform their small yard into an entertainer’s paradise, they knew they had to be open to new ideas.
In 2007, Scott and Robin Boswell moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, back to Robin’s hometown, Kansas City, where Scott had taken a new job as president of Commerce Trust’s West Region. They happily raised their two sons, now grown, and gave Mimi the rescue dog room to roam.
Their classic J.C. Nichols house, once an up-and-down duplex, had been reconfigured into a single-family home replete with architectural details, such as brick and limestone arches.
Just before the pandemic, the Boswells home’s front door. Antique bricks from a former family member’s home were too large to incorporate in the fireplace itself, so they now form brackets that help support the stone mantel.
Dabner laid a hardscape of antique brick in a herringbone pattern for walkways and large Pennsylvania bluestone pavers that mimic area rugs. They provide a wordless message: “Brick means move; bluestone means stop,” he says.
Formal square beds, rimmed with antique brick, feature a dwarf globe blue spruce in the center and lime-green “Chardonnay Pearls” deutzia in the corners, one of the first shrubs to leaf out in spring. Tall hornbeams screen the outdoor area from the neighbors. Snowball and oakleaf hydrangeas add fresh softness accenting the metal kinetic sculpture and the armillary sphere that the Boswells found at Van Liew’s. The red metal poppy sculpture, emblematic of the terrible loss of life immortalized in the poem In Flanders Fields, came from a fundraiser for the National WWI Museum and Memorial.
An herb garden off the kitchen corrals plants in four cold-formed steel-framed raised beds centered around an English Victorian chimney pot. “When I walk the garden every morning with my coffee in hand, I snip herbs, and it makes me happy,” says Robin. Fresh-picked herbs go into her bouquets, salads, and side dishes.
A mix of perennials in containers around the garden help attract pollinators. Here and there, the Boswells also add annuals, such as the daisy-like scaevola, sedum, and impatiens.
A long dining area is adjacent to the outdoor kitchen, which features a Kalamazoo grill (which can crank up to 1,000 degrees) and a Kamado Joe smoker. Everything is right there for the grill master, including a bar area where guests can sit with a glass of wine while Scott smokes slabs of barbecued ribs, rotisserie-grills a Brazilian picanha, or achieves a perfect charry crust on a tomahawk steak. To keep the diminutive Robin comfortable, there’s even a brick footrest under the bar for her, so her feet don’t dangle off the bar stool. Storage underneath keeps wood for the fireplace dry and tidy.
There’s an intentional flow to Dabner’s design—areas to draw the eye and green squares of lawn “for your eye to rest,” he says. Places to move and places to stop. “Formal and informal areas, sculpted versus loose.”
“I feel strongly about giving people something unique, specifically for them,” says Dabner. “For this garden, I truly had clients who went above and beyond.”
