I have seen some of the most ingenious yards and gardens where people are willing to let their imagination go free to create. Some yards or gardens that would be otherwise barren or difficult to shape can turn into the same one that draws people to your neighborhood just to see it.
My husband and I once purchased a small acreage with the remnants of what was once a showplace of a gardener's care. The couple responsible for its care retired and sold it. The next owner's bought it intending to move back from the west coast and rented it to a niece while they waited for their opportunity to return. They loved their niece, but were unprepared for the lifestyle she'd fallen into after a bad divorce. She'd allowed drunken parties and unsupervised run of the property by her friends. Needless to say, the damage to the gardens was extensive by the time the new owners returned and ask their niece to leave.
Unfortunately, they had only returned at the request of the neighbors who were tired of the goings on. They never did move back from California and a year later put the acreage on the market. We are rebuilders. We were able to purchase the place for a very reasonable price. In the year it had set empty the wild had taken over. We had a lot of work to do just to clean out the weeds and overgrowth. Once that was finally done we began to see the bits and pieces of the once glorious gardens. We repaired picket fencing that bordered flower beds and cleared the weeds around the plants. It was not an easy task considering much of the weed cover had overgrown the good flowers and shrubs underneath.
Eventually we restored and repaired a stand of naked ladies, a rose garden, and started repair on a large brick wishing well planter that had been nearly demolished. The real treat was when we found the roof of the wishing well in tact under a large stand of cedars that bordered the property. Then I started to see where we could put our own touches. We made a rock garden under a half circle of lilac bushes. Within it we carefully placed antique and worn gardening tools arranged as if left there by the gardener. An old wheelbarrow was turned on its side; a hand tiller stood against a tree, a potato fork with a broken handle was jabbed into the ground. The work was rewarding and a great way for our family to work and play together.
We no longer live there, but the family who bought it from us continued where we left off. It's a joy to drive past it today and see the next new part of the gardens. We now live in town and still do work on our home here, but its fun to see what others have done with their homes.
One such house in our town became a monument to its history. The owner's were intrigued with our once booming railroad town. They made their front yard into a mini theme park with replicas of railroad tracks with an old steam engine, railroad crossing signs, and other scaled down models that fit the theme. The previous owners of the home did little with the yard and it was weedy with bare spots.
At Christmas time we have a number of home owners who have spent years, money, and mostly handiwork perfecting unusual and beautiful light shows. One such home owner in a town about thirty miles from our house used recycled cans with lights and other materials to create a fabulous attraction. People would come from far away to drive between the huge pair of candy canes and walk freely along the paths of ingenious decoration and creation. After a time the traffic became so large they had to start restricting the number of visitors. Until the couple became too elderly to continue their annual visual feast, children of all ages enjoyed the acre or so of imagination realized.
I watched a program on television recently about a man who took a lifetime, a chainsaw, mower, trimmers, and three acres of trees to make the most beautifully sculpted vision of foliage. He never took any lessons in how to make the trees and bushes bend and train to his will. He learned by doing. His patience and stubborn persistence paid off for his small town. His gardens have drawn media and tourist attention the town's mayor said was never present before.
Another man who loved roses turned his gardens into a fabulous show of varieties of roses and groupings of roses that drew the grateful attention of his neighbors. Anyone wanting to know what to do for a particular rose or just to get a start on roses could go to the rose man'.
For some gardening is an art and labor of love. For others it is a necessary drudgery they must do each summer. The first are able to turn the most stubborn, ugly pieces of ground into layered, bordered, tiered, crazy beautiful visual masterpieces of impossible whimsy or cultivated shows that the second group can only appreciate from the curbside.