“When you walk into a garden, there always should be an element of surprise,” declares landscape designer John Lloyd.

Selim Yolac, his business partner and life partner, chimes in in a nearly identical and equally charming English accent, “And if you can achieve this element of surprise, whether your garden is large or small, it’s sure to be a winner.”

In their own garden, the surprises are as simple as the hidden  Lilliputian lily pond, a circular pool that comes into view only at the end of elevated stone steps planted with creeping thyme and sedum sexangulare and as simply sophisticated as the urn fountain that is spied only through an arched doorway formed by hornbeams.

Although the designing pair, who bill themselves at Yolac & Lloyd, have been puttering about and pruning the English garden of their Fairfield Cape Cod for more than two decades, they never fail to find a new surprise because they have arranged their quarter-acre landscape into “living rooms” that they constantly “redecorate.” “We like to try things out here,” Lloyd says, “and we sometimes use them in clients’ gardens. This garden is very much our portfolio, and the rooms appeal to different people.”

The first outdoor room they enter is the pergola or morning garden, where they start the day with a breakfast of Greek yogurt, blueberries, almonds and sprinkle of granola with a touch of English orange marmalade (on Sundays, the fare is sausages, fried bread and scrambled eggs) sheltered by sprays of the palest pink Constance Spry English roses from David Austin. Another of their bloom rooms, the eclectic parterre, which with its precisely pruned boxwood and purring fountain, is a prime space for sitting, reading and contemplation. When they are in the mood for old-fashioned cocktails, they invariably head for the shade garden, a cozy corner of ferns and moss that is a divine spot for drinks, notably “The Fairfielder,” their own mix of Grey Goose Vodka, tonic and the defining taste touch – a twist of key lime. At 4 o’clock precisely, they repair to the pond garden, where, under the living green umbrella formed by a half-century-old apple tree, they find themselves sitting for a spot of afternoon tea (“It’s real tea – loose tea – from England,” Yolac explains), their 3-year-old blue roan English cocker spaniels, Spencer and Hayley, curled up at their feet as they all watch the brightly colored koi swim among the patches of lilies.

The garden rooms, whose pinks, mauves and lavenders mimic the interior palette of the two-story 1930s clapboard and stone home, blur the lines between indoors and out. “The whites bloom first,” Yolac says. “Then the pale pinks come in – variegated Daphne is one of our favorites -- followed by the hotter pinks and then the season cools off with the blues.”

Yolac and Lloyd take a painterly approach to planting, creating what they like to call informal English gardens, ones that speak with a decidedly Connecticut Yankee’s accent. “It’s more a relaxed formality,” Lloyd says, pointing to the parterre garden, where clipped boxwood frames lamb’s ear, English lavender angustifolia and dwarf nepeta ‘titches blue.’ “A tongue-in-cheek formality.”

Adds Yolac: “It’s not an uptight look. It’s lots of clipped boxwood, lavender and cottage garden plants.”

The laurel shrub by the back bay window is a prime – and pruned -- example of the Yolac & Lloyd signature. The hearty Constitution State native, pieris Japonica, is kept trimmed to look like a fancy bonsai fit for an emperor and is paired with sprays of Constance Spry, one of the many varieties of antique old English David Austin roses in the garden. Container gardens or what Lloyd calls “gardens within gardens” are another hallmark.  “We especially like alpine container gardens, which are filled with plants that grow on mountainsides and with succulents,” says Yolac.

That their gardens are living sculptural art is no surprise: Lloyd, a native of England, and Yolac, who was born in Turkey and raised in England, met at the Royal College of Art in London, where they earned master’s of arts degrees in fashion design in 1983, and then came to America and worked in the apparel industry for 15 years. They set up gardening as an avocation before setting up Yolac & Lloyd seven years ago.

Yolac and Lloyd begin and end each day in the garden. In summer, they rise at 5 and work about 45 minutes before visiting clients, their 1950 shiny Beefeater-red Dodge pickup heralding their arrival with an American flourish.    

It is on the weekends, though, that they really turn their attention to their own garden. It is then that they find the leisure to work in the greenhouse, which is filled with plantings and seedlings and some two dozen varieties of orchids, including the white Phalaenopsis yukimai, the pink Phalaenopsis and the pink and white Denbrobium.

As the personal and professional partnerships of Yolac and Lloyd have grown, so have the garden and the business they have created together. “The garden is always changing,” Lloyd says. “We’re

And whatever the next surprise will be, Yolac says that they are looking forward to discovering it together, bloom by bloom, when they round the next leafy corner.