For 25 years, Patricia Artz of Wausau, Wis., hated her front yard. It was one whole acre of perfectly boring, has-to-be-constantly-mowed lawn.
While she fondly remembers growing up on a farm where her mother had planted masses of flowers, Artz herself never had time for a garden. She had logged 30 years as secretary at an investment firm by the time she retired three years ago.
That’s when the plot literally thickened. With a vengeance, Artz dug up the loathed lawn and turned it into a traffic-stopping, three-di-mensional whimsical walkabout.
Little pathways now thread through smoke trees (Cotinus) and tall, swaying pampas grass (Cortaderia) and fountain grass (Pennisetum), and exuberant floral beds are accented with one-of-a-kind garden ornaments, most unique of which is a ’50s faded blue Chevy pickup that Artz employs as a “wonderful flowerpot.”
Inspiration took root while she was leafing through a magazine from the ’50s, which Artz, 59, says was the best time of her life. A photo showed a truck of that era piled high with vegetables for a trip to town.
“My Lord, what a flowerpot,” Artz thought, and struck out on a mission to find one of her own.
Artz had long moonlighted as a weekend antiques dealer, proprietor of a shop called Pa’s Shed. The store was housed in a vintage railroad depot she had moved onto her property, across the driveway from the house she and her husband, Jerry, built from an old dairy barn. The Artzes frequently travel rural back roads looking for antiques for the shop.
On one foray, they spied the ’50s pickup sitting in the weeds in the woods. The farmer let it go for $50, deemed a bargain by Artz, who says, “You can’t buy a decent pot for that nowadays.”
They pumped up the tires, got the truck home, “plunked it down and planted flowers all around.” Flats of petunias, snapdragons, marigolds and other annuals overflowed from containers on the flatbed in the back. Two department store mannequins, dressed up in Sunday best, sit in the front seat (“The woman driving, because it is the ’90s,” Artz adds with a chuckle).
The pickup led to other non-conformist containers for flowers, such as several old iron beds placed along the pathways as a visual pun.
Other junque du jardin now includes old tricycles and farm machinery, such as an old seeder and a wagon. Artz has planted trees and ornamental grasses all around them, and flowers in every color.
None of the “sculpture” in her garden is expensive, she says. Most are found objects, or things bought at flea markets and antiques shops right around the nearby countryside.
She may have gone “a little overboard,” she admits, “because of the 30 years when I had to work.” But she’s not done yet. “I’ve just started. I’m going to go bigger and bigger.”
The result is she now loves her garden enough to spend lots of time in it. There are benches throughout where she can sit and read and watch birds and butterflies.
Artz is not aware, working alone in the rural Midwest, that she is at the vanguard of a hot gardening trend.
A recent book, “Garden Junk” by Mary Randolph Carter (Penguin Studio, $29.95), documents the hybridization of America’s love affair with gardening with its passion for flea-market foraging.
Carter, vice president of advertising at Polo/Ralph Lauren in New York, wrote “American Junk” (Viking Studio Books, $29.95) in 1994. It was a book chronicling how the mundane, worn, anonymous and rusted had hit the mainstream of collecting.
Now Carter reveals how to track down and display obsolete gardening tools, forgotten lawn furniture, curbside giveaway furniture, rusted garden spreaders, derelict picket fences, pipe-frame gates and more from swap meets, junk yards, yard sales, garage sales, thrift shops, antique shops, etc.
“Gardens are prime gallery space for the most wide-ranging exhibits of garden sculpture,” Carter writes in her new book, encouraging those who might follow in Artz’s pioneering footsteps.
“Whether it’s classical urns or pink plastic flamingos, limestone saints or impish ceramic elves, Ionic Styrofoam pedestals or poured concrete birdbaths, you are the curator of your own back-yard exhibition.”
