Opportunity doesn't always knock. In the case of Amy and David Pollack, it crashed in their front yard.

Almost 10 years ago, Hurricane Floyd uprooted the enormous century-old beech tree that dominated the couple's traditional front lawn in Swarthmore. Today, that same space is a naturalistic landscape of soft lines and sweeping color, with a pond that rocks in spring with the kreek-eek, kreek-eek of frisky frogs looking for hookups.

"These are not square-cut perennial beds. They're moving, flowing spaces," says Amy, a graphic designer whose husband is a pediatrician.

The transformation began with Floyd, whose wild winds catapulted the beech's root ball out of the ground and hurled the tree straight down the yard, into Ogden Avenue, like a riled-up sumo wrestler.

It didn't hit any cars and, mercifully, it didn't fall back on the house, where the Pollacks' two children, then ages 11 and 14, played on the second floor.

The tree's wide branches did damage the neighbors' driveways and yards. And the whole business left the Pollacks' yard a muddy mess of deep gashes, including a tree-crater that was 6 feet deep, 15 feet wide, and filled with water.

"We found ourselves with truly a blank canvas," Amy says, which was both daunting and exciting.

What to do? That was the daunting part. On the exciting side, the crater gave birth to an idea. What about a pond in front of the house? (Several contractors would later demur. Ponds are private, for the backyard, they insisted.)

And the yard was now sunny, which made Amy the artist happy. She loves color, and many of a garden's most colorful plants thrive in sun.

"I'm not from the beige, white and black school," Amy says.

Nor, truth be told, was she much of a gardener. She grew up in Queens and Long Island and worked as art director for large advertising agencies in Manhattan before moving to Philadelphia.

Even now, Amy's not sure how big the family's Swarthmore property is, but when she and her husband bought it 24 years ago, real estate agents described it as "a parklike setting."

"I was used to seeing rats on my way to work and here I was, in a 'parklike setting,' " she says.

For more than a decade, Amy's had her own design firm, Twist 'n Shout, specializing in logos, invitations, brochures, and annual reports for nonprofits. No question she has design credentials - just not the garden variety.

So she hired landscape professionals Phil and Eileen Askey of Wallingford to create "a garden tapestry" - a nonformal design that includes the front-yard pond and emphasizes color, texture, and form, as well as continuous bloom.

The Askeys were ultra-sensitive to the Pollacks' loss of such a major tree, as the hurricane had destroyed half of their plant nursery. And at the time Eileen was going through chemotherapy for breast cancer.

"Amy's garden had a big impact on my life," she says. "Some part of me was very attentive and receptive to her excitement for color."

The Askeys designed large, undulating beds along the road, beside the driveway, and in front of the house. (Later, they would do the side and back yards.) The color palette comprises Amy's favorites: purple and blue, yellow and orange, accented with pale pink and white.

"I love amazing plants," Amy says, and she has many.

Pillowy masses of lacecap hydrangeas. Sculptural, powder-blue stalks of Rudbeckia maxima, known as Dumbo's ears for the leaves. A waist-high dome of Enkianthus campanulatus, whose floating leaf-tiers turn pumpkin orange in fall.

But the pond's the treat. Water rushes over the rocks in a bubbly sigh. Goldfish and small koi meander down below, while chickadees enjoy a seedy lunch at a charming feeder on the side.

In and around the pond, plants speak to Amy's artistic eye. We see geometric water lilies next to reedy papyrus, and big-boned leopard plant (Ligularia) alongside blue-berried grape holly (Mahonia aquifolium).

Amy doesn't know the names and doesn't care. She even throws the plant tags away. "I know every plant the way I know it," she says, "by the shape of the leaf, the color of the flower, or when it blooms."

This garden, then, is no studied arboretum. It's something to be enjoyed by family and neighbors, walkers and bicyclists.

"Swarthmore is such a walking community, people stop out front all the time," says Amy, who is a walker and cyclist herself.

She also does the weeding, watering and pruning, sometimes at 7 a.m. or on after-work walkabouts; every spring she hires someone to help with the rest.

Still, she insists that, to an extent, her now-mature garden is a serendipitous being capable of growing itself. "I love the way things come up and reseed. I like to let them grow," she says.

And grow they do. Downy stalks of Thalictrum or meadow rue, their lavender stems topped with froth, poke up all over the place. Very unscripted and, in certain gardens, quite politically incorrect.

"I know a lot of people would tell me to get rid of them," Amy says, "but I like them here."

Here and there and there. In fact, come back next year and you'll likely see more.

Just stop out front. Let your eye wander from road to house, and enjoy every bit of beauty in between. Ever the graphic artist, Amy likens this visual journey to a well-designed brochure for a client.

"I have to take people from Page 1 to the back page. I need to capture readers' interest all the way through," she says.

Contact gardening writer Virginia A. Smith at 215-854-5720 or vsmith@phillynews.com.