Henry Homeyer: Add art, humor and whimsy to your garden

By Henry Homeyer
©2026 Telegraph Publishing LLC

For some, gardening is serious business. Not me. Well, I do consider myself a serious gardener, having been growing things since I was a toddler, but I like to make our gardens full of plants – and things – that bring smiles or even laughs to anyone visiting the garden. Gardens should be beautiful, but also fun.

When I was a small boy my older sister, Ruth Anne, introduced me to jewel weed, also called touch-me-not (Impatiens capensis). It is an annual weed that grows is shady, moist areas and has small bright yellow and orange flowers. But the best part for a kid are the seed pods. Each little canoe-shaped pod is spring loaded with  seeds, and when ripe, these pods can throw seeds several feet. Pick one, and it explodes in your hand. Guaranteed to make a child – or this old guy – laugh. Mind you, I try hard to eradicate 98% of the jewel weed I see in our gardens, but I leave a few at the edges to amuse and delight kids of all ages.

Fuzzy plants are great for getting visitors to smile. Right now I have a variety of burnet (Sanguisorba spp.) that is named ‘Lilac Squirrel.’ If you are of a certain age, you may remember when bicycles sometimes were adorned with real squirrel tails on the ends of the handlebars. These flowers, a lovely pink-lilac color, hang down like those squirrel tails, hence the name. I always am delighted when I see them. They make me smile, as do pussywillows in the spring.

Then there is turtlehead (Chelone obliqua), a gorgeous, tall, fall blooming flower I grow in moist, part shade to full sun locations. It has pink flowers that mimic the open mouth of a turtle. They are loved by bumblebees that force themselves inside the blossoms, with little room to spare. Once inside, they sometimes make what I call “growling noises.” Are the bees angry they are having a hard time finding their way out? Drunk on pollen? I don’t know, but I grin when I hear them.

Back in the 1980s, when we had real cold winters, I had grown a peach tree to size and was anticipating a good crop of fruit. I waited, come spring, for it leaf out. And waited. No luck. It was dead. Instead of lamenting my misfortune, I planted annual vines all around it: morning glories, climbing nasturtium, scarlet runner beans and perhaps others. They grew, they blossomed, they amazed visitors: “What tree is that?” When I told them it was a dead peach, they laughed, every one.

Later I had a contorted hazelnut die of old age and my wife, Cindy, who is a fabric artist, tied on strips of different colored cloth to the branches. They blew in the breeze and added color to the garden for a year or more.

A shrub I grow next to my little stream is called buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis). This full-sun to part shade shrub is a native, often growing in standing water in swamps – I just saw some in bloom down in Connecticut in the wild, but have never seen it up here, except in my garden. Why is it worthy of a giggle? When blooming it has one-inch spherical blossoms with many tiny white florets coming out of it, sort of like what I always imagined Sputnik to look like, with little antennae sticking out. You will want to touch it, sniff it. But it is not a handsome shrub most of the year. Although rated as a Zone 5 plant, for me it dies back to the ground most years in winter – even though we’ve been moved from Zone 4 to Zone 5.

Surprise in the garden can be good for a giggle, too. For several years I had “Sister Mary-Lou” in the garden. She was a full-bodied, bosomy scarecrow in a purple dress and old rubber barn boots. She was not made to scare away crows (as her ancestors were), but for the fun of seeing her. Even when I knew she was there, she was real enough to startle me early in the morning. Which then made me laugh at myself. She went traveling to the Tunbridge, Vt., World’s Fair in the late 1990s and won Best in Show in the scarecrow competition, though she declined to brag about that. She has long been retired. A good scarecrow is always three dimensional, not just some clothes hung on a pole and a cross bar.

Each year for the past 20 years or more there has been an event in Woodstock, Vermont called Sculpture Fest on the property of Charlet and Peter Davenport at 509 Prosper Road and at the adjoining non-profit King Farm. This year it opened in mid-July and will remain open, dawn to dusk throughout the summer and into the fall. And although it displays some serious works of art, it also always has some fun and whimsy – and ideas for me about what I might add to our gardens. It is free and open to the public.

So what whimsy might you add to your garden? I remember when pink plastic flamingoes were popular on front lawns. Then they became passé. Recently I saw a few poking their noses out of a field of tall grass – and had a chuckle. Yard sculpture can be almost anything.  I have a rusty toy truck from the 1940s sitting atop a stone wall. I like seeing it there, and have had nice comments about it from visitors.

So stop at that yard sale you might otherwise pass by. See if there is anything interesting, colorful or weird that you might sneak into the garden. After all, garden whimsy doesn’t need to be weeded!