Little clumps of them are scattered around Cernie and Joe Meszaros's garden: Green stems, with white heads showing above surrounding plants. They are 18 Trillium civic beautification awards, earned during the past 40 years.

Record or not, that's impressive. The couple has been making a garden together since 1961 and received their first Trillium in '68.

How do you win 18 Trilliums? Cernie doesn't know. "I'm shocked every time I get one," she says.

It is not by doing the same things over and over. She changes her beds and flowers every year. "Forty-seven years and 47 gardens."

Their garden on Upper Wentworth Street is a splash of colour on a busy street. Joe has been in the house since he was a teenager, in 1953. It was his mother's house then; she'd been a farmer's wife -- dairy and tobacco -- near Tillsonburg.

Joe's father died young of a stroke and his widow brought her children to the house on Upper Wentworth. Joe has been there since.

He and Cernie (a fruit farmer's daughter from St. Catharines) met at a dance, married in '61, bought the house from his mother in '65, and raised a family there. He retired after 40 years driving Coca-Cola's big trucks, and now they work together on the garden: He does the heavy lifting and the vegetable garden. "She's the one for the plants," he says. "She knows the flowers."

Since 1956, Trilliums have been awarded to people who beautify their properties: house, front garden and driveway if there is one. The Meszaros house is a perfect example of what the program rewards and inspires. It's immaculate. The front has tidily clipped euonymus, daubs of colourful begonias and zinnias, and plants for winter interest such as Autumn Joy sedum and small evergreens. Pots of annuals provide colour on one side of the house and across the back of the driveway.

"I never plant the same annuals twice in a row," Cernie says.

Beyond a small patch of lawn in the back is a mass of colour from deep beds on either side of a flagstone path. Old-fashioned (but newly "rediscovered") flowers such as cosmos and zinnia are planted among stately bear's breeches (acanthus), the colourful but slightly bizarre love-lies-bleeding, gracefully arched butterfly bush, the spectacular dried seedheads of ornamental allium, blue salvia and, a little earlier in the summer, coreopsis.

Beyond that is Joe's vegetable garden. The second crop of bush beans is coming up, but tomatoes are slow to ripen because of a lack of heat. Onion and garlic were harvested a little early because they feared the rain-drenched soil might rot them in the ground.

Cernie and Joe don't go away on holidays. He built a big covered porch on the back of the house years ago with a fine view over the garden and enough room to shelter the family even in a pouring rain.

"That porch is our cottage," Joe says.

They don't use pesticides -- "There's no need," Joe says. Snails are the garden's only scourge and they hand-pick those after a rain or in the early morning.

Joe spreads 30 bags' worth of cow manure on the beds each fall, then spreads finely chopped grass and fallen leaves (Joe mows the lawns and rakes fall leaves for nine elderly neighbours). By spring, weather and worms -- "our ground is loaded with worms," he says -- have broken it all down into the soil.

Joe and Cernie are partners in the garden, finish each other's sentences, talk about how lucky they have been and still are, and load a visitor down with fresh garlic, onions and peppers to take home.

They're a lovely couple with a lovely garden, and they make Hamilton a little prettier and a little nicer.

Rob Howard lives and gardens in Hamilton.