When the centrepiece of your garden is a magnificent, ever-changing view of sky and water -- in this case, Lake Ontario with the lights of Niagara in the far, far distance -- the last thing you want is for plants to obscure it. Your garden should frame and embrace the panorama, soften its edges and shelter the home from the site's wilder aspects.

That was part of the challenge when Michael Gallow, with wife Jill Cribbin, bought a home on Burlington's lakeshore in 2001. He wanted to create a garden in harmony with the West Coast-Asian materials and lines of the house.

The result is a comfortable, personal garden with many interesting -- and not inexpensive -- design pieces. It's very much a Canadian garden with Japanese and West Coast influences and elements.

"It's a sheltered spot, and we're not cottage people, so this became our retreat in the city," Gallow says.

Plantings between the street and the house, as with all front gardens, are more for show. Front and back are tied together by pathways, plantings, a lovely spherical acrylic fountain and a Japanese-influenced screen and ceremonial gate. When so many side gardens are afterthoughts, Gallow has properly seen this as an essential part of the garden as a whole.

Trees are the signature of this garden. A large Austrian pine, pruned in Japanese topiary style and showing a coarse, gnarled trunk, anchors one side of the back garden.

"I wanted the windswept pine look -- like a jack pine but right for this garden."

The lake moderates air temperatures in summer and winter, and prevailing winds blow perpendicular to the garden. That creates wave action on the lake -- "When there's a winter storm, the noise is like a train going by" -- but the garden is protected by trees, hedges and fence. "I was convinced there was a good microclimate here for those plants," Gallow says.

The garden sits on a prehistoric beach, so the soil "is pure brown sugar sand for 30 feet down. The drainage is fantastic, and the plants love that. But we amend a lot -- five or six yards of compost every year."

Gallow had done a bit of gardening before and read widely on plants and garden design. "This has really been a blank canvas I've been painting on."

His plants includes classic Japanese maples, broad-leaved evergreens such as rhododendrons and interesting conifers such as Hinoki cypress and mugho pine. There's a wide range of interesting perennials, and many plants are chosen for fall colour as well as spring and summer interest.

Holly and rhododendrons thrive. Climbing hydrangea, a notoriously slow starter, has taken off in just a few seasons, with lots of new growth and abundant flowers.

There are great combinations of colour, leaf shape and texture, and the most interesting plants are Japanese maples -- he has planted seven -- and a fascinating umbrella pine with long (seven to eight centimetre) needles spaced evenly like the ribs of tiny umbrellas. When Gallow's garden was recently on a fundraising tour "this was the plant that everybody asked about."

He chose the Japanese maples, several of which are varieties dating back to the 1600s, for their deeply cut leaves and interesting colours. Shigitatsu sawa is one of the few variegated Japanese maples, opening up white and green in the spring, and still having distinct colour patterns in the height of summer.

Shindeshojo is a brilliant pink, turning full orange in the fall, and Corallinum is a soft pink and orange pygmy variety. The Waterfall variety is Gallow's favourite.

"In the fall it goes orange -- put-your-sunglasses-on orange. It's not for very long, but for that week it's my favourite plant in the entire garden."

Rob Howard lives and gardens in Hamilton. gardenwriter@gmail.com