Having a tiny backyard is no excuse for having a tiny garden. Mary Lou Paulson has turned her modest 40-foot by 15-foot Rapid City yard into a gardening marvel.

"What's so amazing to me is it's a relatively new garden, but things have taken off so nicely," Paulson said. She and her husband, Glenn, live in a duplex he built on Cottonwood Street. They moved in three years ago this August. The house sits on their smallest yard yet, which has been an enjoyable challenge for this master gardener.

"My garden is really tiny, and I am very delighted with it," she said.

So delighted, in fact, that she put her yard on the 2008 Rapid City annual garden walk so others could see what could be done with a tiny space.

"The comment we heard most often was, 'Look, I could do that at my house.' And that was the point of it all. We wanted people to see you don't have to have big acreages. If you have that and like it, that's fine."

A colorful perennial bed, a bench her husband made from weathered wood and a whimsical sign offering five-cent garden tours are a hint to the delights that lie beyond the gate to the Paulsons' yard.

Just inside is a cozy gazebo decorated with miniature white lights. A string of multicolored bug-shaped patio lights hangs along the privacy fence over a water fountain of tiered clay pots.

"It's a steady glee and kind of relaxing to hear that sound of the water," Paulson said.

The gazebo not only provides a place to entertain and relax, it also provides a little shade in the treeless yard. No shade may deter some gardeners from having shade-loving plants, but not Paulson. With the help of her husband's carpentry skills, she has created a shade/fairy garden. Glenn Paulson built a trellis shelter with lattice on both sides and splats across the top.

"He built me a little fairy bench out of gray weathered wood, and I've got a cute little fairy in there. That's where all the shade plants are," she said.

Her shade plants include impatiens, dwarf hostas and a Japanese painted fern.

A bamboo-type roll-up shade is the finishing touch. She drops the shade in the mornings around 9:30 and raises it later in the afternoon so the plants receive dappled sun through the lattice.

"It works great," she said. "The plants in there are true shade plants, and they are thriving."

Next to the gazebo is a wooden shed Glenn made to house the gardening tools. He also made the bird houses that line the garden fence and the fairy houses and the three wooden men that live at the base of the deck.

In addition to making decorative items for the yard, Glenn Paulson likes to grow vegetables. He has bags of cherry tomatoes, which he started from seed, hanging from the deck and buckets of tomato plants along the bottom of the deck. His potted cucumber plants are already beginning to climb the string guide attached to the deck.

Because Paulson likes to cook with fresh herbs, she has an herb garden that includes thyme, sage, garlic and regular chives, basil and tarragon. The landscaping also includes perennials they brought from their former home. Paulson said she is grateful that the owners of her old house have let her dig up some of the perennials she left behind. Last year, she brought over a bleeding heart plant.

"It's just a beautiful, old-fashioned plant," she said. "It's got those sprays of little red hearts. That thing is just blooming its heart out this spring."

Several colorful hybrid irises line the back of her yard, where she is training her climbing roses to grow horizontally along a chain-link fence. Because of her "hanky-sized" yard, she has to keep things pruned and in scale with the rest of her garden.

"It's up to the gardener to keep the plants controlled to fit into the place you need to have them," she said.

She is controlling her climbing rose by tying it along the fence, which she said will produce more blooms.

Paulson completed the 10-week master gardener course a dozen years ago in Spearfish. Since then, she has worked on a number of projects, including the herb garden next to the sun dial near Sioux Park, which she and fellow master gardener Vaud Oberlander got up and running. She also helped to move the plants when the city reconfigured the gardens several years ago because of drainage issues.

She is currently working on a landscaping project with other master gardeners at Rapid City Regional Hospital's Auxiliary Hospice House on Elk Street. It is the Lowell Hamilton memorial named for the late husband of Paulson's longtime friend, Adeline Hamilton of Rapid City. Paulson and Adeline Hamilton worked together as registered nurses in the 1950s and have remained close friends. Paulson asked Hamilton if she would consider designating her husband's memorial to the landscaping project, and she did.

"That's where the major portion of our funding has come," Paulson said. "We were so pleased."

Hamilton, too, is pleased.

"You should see the work they've done up there already, and it's not very good ground up there," Hamilton said.

Hamilton, who confesses she is not into gardening, appreciates her friend's talents. "She's very knowledgeable about plants and things. She has this small yard to work in, and it is amazing what she has in that little area. She has a little bit of everything."

Master gardener Louise Engelstad of Rapid City calls Paulson a wonderful resource.

"She is more than willing to share all of her information," Engelstad said. "She's a great support to other gardeners and other projects. She also teaches herb classes through the Growing with the Masters series."

The best advice Paulson can give to other gardeners is to properly prepare the soil to compensate for South Dakota soil. She uses the fine-grained compost available through the city landfill, which she said is very good. She also recommends using raised beds if possible.

She said the best advice she ever received came from her mother-in-law.

"She told me that if you want beautiful iris, you better water them throughout the summer - after they fruit and bloom - because that's when they're making their buds for next year," she said.

Even this master gardener admits to making mistakes.

"I always plant the peonies too deep. I have two that I will have to lift this fall," she said.

Those peonies are from her husband's great-great grandmother's garden. The Paulsons have carried them with them every time they have moved.

She said she adds something new every year to her yard, which she calls a fun little place. And like most gardeners, she said her own is a work in progress.

"Our credo is 'Well, there's always next year.' We'll come up with something we think we want to do or change something that didn't turn out for us this year."