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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.

Learn more about this author, Glenda K. Fralin.
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