Jaw-dropping. Absolutely stunning. One of the most amazing garden displays I've seen.

Thousands of flowers in bloom. Dozens of colours and shades, in hundreds of combinations. Blues and yellows and whites and red and purples and mauves and pinks and orange. I'd compare it to a giant Persian carpet, except it's brighter than that.

I'm reaching here, trying to give some sense of the amazing sight that greeted me when I stepped up onto the deck at the top of the country garden made by Trudy Bliedung and Roy Horlick just a stone's throw east of the crossroads community of Carlisle, in Flamborough. I've seen a colour display like this really only once before, and that was in a 200-year-old walled garden next to an even older Scottish castle.

I stood there with my mouth hanging open that time, too.

Trudy and Roy opened their garden to visitors during Hamilton Spectator Open Garden Week in June, and two visitors sent e-mail urging me to see it.

The front yard gives little hint of the extraordinary garden -- in terms of both its effect and the amount of work that has gone into making it -- that lies behind the house. It's a big property, rolling on a gentle downhill slope 100 metres from the back of the house. It's not just a lot of flowers; it's a series of garden areas.

One area, for example, is a wonderful progression of purple to white. Purple coneflower is beside hosta with pale mauve flowers, which is next to creamy white goat's beard, adjacent to a massive, brilliant white Annabelle hydrangea.

There's the full spectrum of garden conditions, ranging from dry shade under an old maple at the top of the slope to sunny wetland at the bottom. "So I can buy any plant I want and there's a place to put it," Trudy says.

There's an old sump, or spring, at the end of the garden that flows 365 days a year. Trudy and Roy have channelled its outflow through three linked ponds. Frogs flourish there, as do butterflies and bees in the rest of the garden.

They started gardening in 1992, the year after they bought the property. Neither of them, remarkably, had gardened much before.

Most of the back garden has been made in the past four years. Roy used a manual sod-cutter to lift hundreds of square feet of grass for beds. The soil is very sandy, and they add a lot of compost to the beds. "It's all our own - leaf compost and kitchen compost," she says. "We have a green bin, and we never use it. It all goes into compost."

Trudy has grown many plants from seed -- including some she collected on trips to Britain. She's also very active in the Flamborough Horticultural Society and sells or trades divisions of her plants so she can bring take home different ones. She keeps track of what she grows: There were 352 plant varieties in her garden when she last did a count, and that, she says with a laugh, was a few years ago.

When a garden is this thickly planted, it's important to stop aggressive plants from taking over. Trudy starts making lists every summer of what plants she'll need to thin or remove the next spring.

"I need to track from one season to the next what is going on and what needs doing," she says.

How much time does a garden like this take?

"As much time as I have," she says with a rueful laugh. "I love to weed, -- would you believe it?"

Roy, who loves to show "before" photos of the garden, says it's a special place where they've seen a family of foxes playing in the lower meadow.

"It's like a painting," he says. "We do it for ourselves."

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