Creve Coeur Lake freezes over most winters thick enough that the dragon boat docks sit empty and rimmed in ice, the whole wide sheet of water gone quiet under a sky that stays gray through most of January, and it's in the subdivisions ringing that same lake that Greener Designs LLC spends its winter mornings with a plow blade instead of a shovel. A landscape design company thinks about a property in layers — the beds, the borders, the way a walkway curves toward a front door — and that same layered thinking carries into how a driveway gets cleared, working the curves of a designed entrance rather than pushing snow in a straight line. The subdivisions built up around the lake tend to have longer, more deliberately shaped driveways than older parts of St. Louis County, curved to show off a landscaped yard rather than just connect a garage to a street, and clearing them takes a plow operator who already knows the shape underneath the snow. By midmorning those same curved drives stand out against still-white lawns, the design underneath as visible in winter as it is in June. The work happens in the dark hours before a lake-view neighborhood wakes up, well ahead of the first dog-walker on the path around the lake.