think everyone has their own idea of a perfect garden. For me, it is a sea of roses and a big vegetable garden that I could wade through like I did when I was a child. But, like many people who live in condominiums and homeowners associations, my own gardening skills are confined to my living room and (in the summer) my balcony, where I have settled for petunias and impatiens instead of roses, and my vegetable garden is a modest cherry-tomato plant and a bit of aggressive mint.

Homeowner Anne Vance also has a perfect garden in her mind. "The gardens in England are simply beautiful," she said dreamingly. "I would love to have a big English garden with herbs abd vegetables and wildflowers."

When Anne and her family moved into the newly developed Blackhorse Farms Homeowners Association in 1989, the La Jolla association did not have the English garden of her dreams, but the area's temperate weather and abundance of flowers drew her and many other homeowners to the association's 121 homes. "Many people move here for the beauty and to have gardens that they may not have been able to have elsewhere," she explained. "We had lived out in the desert, and you just can't grow things there. I wanted a magnolia tree and flowering jasmine...here I can have those types of plants."

Appointed chair of Blackhorse Farms' landscape committee three years ago, Anne has played a major role in ensuring that she and the other association members can enjoy the thriving landscape they've longed for. With the help of the landscape maintenance form of New Way Professional Landscape Services in San Diego and the landscape architecture firm of Jeff Stone & Associates in La Jolla, Blackhorse Farms is

taking a second look at the landscape's original design.

Anne rattled off the list of changes with ease-converting to drip irrigation, choosing drought-resistant plants, replacing much of the grass with groundcover, thinning out densely planted areas-but she, better than anyone, realizes the amount of work involved with each task. "Also," she continued, "we just needed a change. At the front end, we wanted to enhance the beauty with giant birds of paradise and palm trees, and we added some lighting, too. And then along the outside of the walls, which is exposed to traffic and students (from the University of California, located directly across the street), we wanted lower maintenance plants. We want to make it look as green as it can with as little water as we can."

"The job is never going to be done," said a good-humored John Vidales, who manages the HOA's landscape for New Way. "There's always more we always try to improve and give them more."

Giving the homeowners of Blackhorse Farms more than they expect is a difficult task; they have high standards. "The people here demand more detail," John said, "and I personally like that. I go on a monthly walk-through of the landscape with Jeff (Stone), Anne and the other board members and landscape committee members, and they're very thorough...very conscientious."

When I told Anne what John said, she laughed, but did not disagree. She readily admitted that she and her fellow association members probably demand more attention to detail than most associations. "We are very detail-oriented," she stated. "The people who live here want this place to look first-class at all times." There are no apologies here. With monthly walk-throughs, reports at board meetings, landscape committee meetings four to five times per year, and countless meetings with Jeff and John, Anne and the other landscape committee members work hard to make their association's landscape "top-drawer."

So if John and his crew from New Way have to vacuum the garage entries instead of sweeping them and perform all of their chemical applications on the same day of each week, they will attend to these details with a smile. "The people at this association get me more involved than anywhere else," John said. "The best part is that everyone is very knowledgeable. They don't ask anything of us that isn't reasonable. It makes me comfortable that they take the time to understand what we're doing and why, and that they give us the time we need to do our job correctly."

This level of communication is something that New Way is known for, and it was one of the company's major selling points with Blackhorse Farms when they were bidding the project in 1995. "One of the reasons we liked New Way was because they emphasized communication," Anne recalls. "Most other landscapers don't do that-they focus on doing the work, and that's only part of it. I travel internationally for my job, and New Way takes that into consideration. They are always available, and their response time is good."

For New Way, good communication and fast response is the standard, but for John Vidales, it is also a matter of

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As I spoke with John about the association he admires so much, I realized that he too, like Anne and I, had his own idea of a perfect garden. "If you could choose any part of the landscape at Blackhorse Farms to overlook from the windows of your home, what would it be?" I asked. I expected him to mention a field of bright pink geraniums or the mystic crown of a coral tree in bloom, but he surprised me.

"The fountain," he replied. "When I first came to look at the project, I fell in love with this fountain they have with a coral tree behind it. It's so serene, especially at night. When they told me they were relandscaping, that's the first thing I asked: "What are you going to do with that fountain?"

Anne assured me that the fountain is the "centerpiece of the landscape," so it is highly unlikely that it will end up in John's yard anytime soon. A coral tree will, however; he is planting one this fall.