By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

Scouting Colleen and Harvey Schwartz’s garden in Bellingham, Washington, I was taken with their use of craftsmen and artists to make the garden even more of a visual treat.

Let’s start with two of their gates: I liked one for practical reasons, and another for beauty when “ordinary” would have been functionally good enough, and a lot cheaper.

The beautiful gate leads into a very private, courtyard-like patio that is itself made lovely with vegetables and ornamentals. The patio is walled off so that the Schwartzes can have some modicum of privacy when they indulge in outdoor showers, which the courtyard has also provided for. But they like knowing who’s dropping by, so they purchased a moon gate made by David Helm fitted with a ceramic sun sculpted by Chris Moench. It makes for great counterpoint, and probably has spiritual significance beyond the obvious, but you'll have to ask Harvey about that.

The practical gate is, at its heart, a cattle gate that separates the driveway from a catch-all storage area. The problem with cattle gates is that you see through them, so the Schwartzes commissioned Tom Burton (Tom’s Bamboo) to conceal it with a beautiful bamboo façade.

For the deck, they bought an octagonal table from Don Shapiro (360 224-1951). It is certainly as effective as King Arthur’s round table, and for all the same reasons.

And for a front-yard patio, the Schwartzes chose to do another circle, this time in stone. The craftsmen were, this time, $10-an-hour student laborers from Western Washington University. If this circular stone patio is any indication, they all have bright futures ahead of them.