Debbie Naeter's garden is not her hobby and not just pretty to look at, though it pleases all the senses. Her garden is a map of the way she lives.

These August mornings, Naeter walks out her back door and picks a handful of blackberries or raspberries for her bowl of cereal. She grew the tomato and most of the ingredients in the tabouli salad she will take to work for lunch. The organic bulgar came from a farm in Wisconsin.

When she gets home from work, the garden draws her out to play.

"I can barely make myself go in at night because I'm having so much fun," she says.

The garden in the moonlight is her favorite place to sit. "You can come here among the honeysuckle in the early summer at night and become intoxicated," she says.

The profusion of plants nearly camouflages the swing, rough-hewn benches and chairs positioned for anyone who wants to stop and take it all in. She moves the chairs around "depending on who's coming and what's growing."

Something to watch

The garden is always changing from month to month and season to season. It is something to watch.

Graceful hemlock trees line the eastern boundary of the property. Apple and pear and peach trees grow nearby. Depending on the season, she grows tomatoes, eggplant, artichokes -- rarely grown in Southeast Missouri gardens -- beets, spinach, snow peas, potatoes, corn, okra, gourds, chard, kale and Chinese cabbage. There's basil and lots of parsley so the butterflies get their share.

Her dogs, VanElla and Miss Annie, let Naeter know when the tomatoes are ripe. "I have to beat the dogs off the food," she says.

Framing the vegetables grown in beds because of the drought conditions over the past six years are the purple blooms of celosia and rows of sunflowers.

Even taller than the 10-foot sunflowers are castor bean plants that keep moles away. During certain months, a hollyhock forest grows in the garden.

All this has evolved without a plan. "All the beds started with compost piles," Naeter says. When deciding where to plant something new, she walks around until she finds a full-sun spot.

Frogs the color of emeralds and goldfish occupy the small pond she built. She provided the fish. The frogs volunteered. "If you build it they will come," she says.

Bowls of water are stationed throughout the garden for the frogs and toads.

Little of the lushness in this garden is visible from the lane in front of her house. Naeter likes it that way. In fact, she is putting up fences and gates to block out the new construction going up on the other side of the lane.

"It's not so much I don't want them to know my life," she says matter of factly. "I don't want to know theirs."

She fashions the gates from the headboards and footboards of metal beds. Parts of the house, which she transformed from a four-room farmhouse into a peacefully airy haven with a spa and a second-floor porch with a hammock, are made from materials recycled from other outbuildings on the land.

Naeter's house sits on 11 acres of land just north of Cape Girardeau. Her house and barn and garden occupy two of the acres. Some of the rest is pasture. Most of the land is wooded and completely wild. She likes it that way.

In the summer on full-moon nights, a bonfire sometimes lights the sky and friends play drums. She says the neighbors are used to it.

Meant for each other

Naeter realized she and the property were meant for each other the first time she saw it. "My name was written on that barn in neon lights," she says.

She transformed the garage into an open-sided potting shed and soon will add a summer kitchen to the shed where she will do canning under mosquito netting. She bathes in an outdoor bathtub in warm weather.

She catches rainwater and heats with wood unless it's frigid. The house doesn't have air conditioning. "I don't want to shut the good noises out," Naeter says.

For many years she worked three jobs to keep this enchanted place. Naeter once made her living as a waitress but quit when her manager at the Ramada Inn insisted the waitresses stop sewing up the slit in the side of their dresses. That led to a job tending plants at the mall. She grew up in a family that had a farm and a garden and spent lots of time at the library learning about plants. Eventually she opened her own business downtown, The Plant Lady's Corner. Part of the job involves taking care of plants for other businesses.

"There are plants I have tended for 18 years," she says.

Naeter has a single objective for growing vegetables: "I want real food."

She raises spinach in raised beds year-round. With the exception of grains and cheeses, her hands are responsible for almost everything she eats.

"Every day, I eat what I have picked that day," she says. "You know what food tastes like."

In 21st century America, hers is no longer the typical experience. "When most children say, I'm hungry,' they think McDonald's," she says.

Naeter's garden is organic. Rather than spray, she kills adult bugs by hand and uses a canola oil product to control the immature phases. Sometimes the women who work at Naeter's shop come out to help her take on the bugs.

"You just squash em," she says, pinching her fingers together. "These younger gals wear gloves."

She thinks the epidemic of cancer and other diseases like adult-onset diabetes in the Western world are products of the chemicals and poisons that have proliferated in the food chain during the last half of the 20th century.

It's too late to go back, she says. "Those who can need to start somewhere, to offer some balance," she says. "Pockets that don't have chemicals allow for the diversity of butterflies and bees."

Plants like phlox and butterfly bush are there just for the benefit of butterflies.

Just when she's being overrun, the garden finds a way to balance itself. A scourge of harlequin bugs, seldom seen by local gardeners heretofore, ravaged her horseradish plants but soon were descended on by daddy longlegs spiders.

"You're not going to get rid of bugs and you don't want to," she says, "but you want a balance."

Naeter has been married twice but says she does not share space easily. She lives with two dogs and three or four cats. At other times, horses, cattle and donkeys have lived on the land with her.

She thinks she's very lucky to live in a garden. It's a full-time life.

"Sometimes you just run to keep up, or you jump back and watch," she says.