A Landscape in Your Pocket So what if you don't have 100 acres to call your own? W. Gary Smith, the landscape architect who has worked with Wayne and Beth Gibbens for 20 years, has a tiny garden in Toronto. "It's about 15 by 20 feet, so we can't have a lot of plants," said Mr. Smith, who shares a home with his partner, David J. Phillips, a professor of information studies at the University of Toronto. But even so, he said: "Five plants is not enough. That would be boring. You have to have some level of plant diversity. Then it's the paving, the fences and walls - a uniformity in architectural materials - that pulls it all together. Once you establish a simple structure, then the plants and little details like personal objects from your past will work together. "A rich personal garden," Mr. Smith said, combines "the personality of the designer and the connection to the broader place." His garden, for instance, includes fragments of his life gathered over the last 30 years: pieces of Wissahickon schist from his years in Philadelphia, limestone from Austin, Tex. "It's a personal sort of archive," he said. Just a little rap that reminds me of someplace. But he wouldn't to try to grow Texas plants in Toronto, he said. Plants in his garden need to be suited to northern, urban conditions. Although they don't necessarily have to be native. "There's a giant katsura tree in my neighbor's yard," he said. I don't know how it got there, but this is Little Italy, where there is quite a gardening tradition. Mr. Smith inhales its fragrance in the fall, when the toasty leaves smell like cotton candy, and is grateful to be able to enjoy the big tree without devoting any of his own space to it. In his yard, he has trained a smoke bush into a small canopy tree and recently planted a sugar maple in the back. "It will gradually evolve into shade, which is fine," he said. Gardens change over time. Another piece of advice: avoid fads. It may be popular to use old wheelbarrows as planters, or to hang them from your tree, he said. But there's a difference between going down to a junk shop and buying an old rusty wheelbarrow and planting in it, and using one that got rusty while you were gardening with it for 10 years. In the latter case, that wheelbarrow would add meaning to your garden. On the other hand, don't be afraid to have fun with incongruous objects. When his partner's mother gave them a set of Waterford crystal paperweights, they didn't quite fit the living room. So he and Mr. Phillips decided to put them in the garden. "They look great out in the dirt," he said, "and she loves it."