April 27, 2025
In my last post I showed Tom Ellison’s front-yard cottage garden, which includes a large raised pond along with a majestic sycamore and flowering sweet peas, spuria iris, and pickerel weed. Now let’s step into the back garden to see the rest. Tom favors pops of red flowers and foliage against the mossy green home, like this fiery begonia.
But mostly he relies on textures and shades of green, especially in shady areas. I admired this small back patio, with rattan-and-wire chairs around a fire pit. A Japanese maple with leaves tinged with orange makes a graceful accent.
Tom has a good eye for color. When he spotted this windchime, he knew its multicolored “leaves” would be a good match for the maple.
The soft-green-and-red color scheme continues with this ceramic prickly pear attached to a deck wall.
Opposite the patio, you’re treated to a fantasy world Tom created “for the grandchildren.” Considering the grandchildren are aging out of the fantasy while Tom shows no sign of slowing down on his gnome creations, I suspect it’s all really for him. Which makes it even more charming.
A miniature train track loops around a stream crossed by gnome-sized covered bridges. The gnomes, Tom explains, are jewelers, and they dig for gems along the stream.
Their creations are displayed in jeweled flowers in the monkey grass.
When Tom wasn’t spinning his tale of gnome lapidary, Pat confessed that when they visit antique malls, she often finds Tom poking through collections of old brooches, selecting ones that he can turn into jeweled flowers.
Tom — ahem, the gnomes — sure stays busy with jeweled decorating.
The gnomes also like to decorate with buttons and have dressed up a tree man who watches over the little village.
Tom cops to making other works of art himself, like this creative Bottle Boy — a fun twist on a traditional bottle tree.
One of his newest works is Skysculpture, modeled after the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Tom made a lavender backdrop for it out of painted plywood, the better to show it off.
“I was thinking about the Anthropocene,” Tom explains, “how humans are dominating nature. And how skyscrapers are monuments of the Anthropocene that people choose to live in — monuments marking this increasing tension between humans and the other nature.”
Bobbing on a wire at the top is a tiny pterodactyl — adding a note of “sky whimsy,” as Tom puts it. “It calls attention to the struggle of nature and man to live together.”
“The subconscious works in strange ways,” he adds.
Electron City, a totem made out of old circuit boards, offers another way of musing on cities. Tom says circuit boards have always reminded him of tiny cityscapes.
In a small patio garden tucked behind the home, yellow star jasmine scents the air with sweet fragrance.
Golden hibiscus echoes the yellow.
Shade-loving leatherleaf mahonia, river fern, and ‘Soft Caress’ mahonia cozy up to a pump-style water feature.
The water spills onto a geode — I wonder if the gnomes will get their hands on this.
Speaking of which, more gnomes live back here in birdhouses Tom found online.
The gnomes are living their best life at Tom’s.
Another of his sculptures — Grandpa’s Wrenches
Along the driveway is a theater-like collection of potted plants. Tom moves them into the shed in winter — and it’s a lot of work. He says he needs to cut down on his collection by about 20 pots. I suggested hiring a helper for such seasonal tasks — no need to sacrifice plants and pots that way!
A hibiscus adds more red.
You gotta have Heart, reads a garden plaque.
Queen Victoria agave — a beauty of an agave with pin-striped leaves
A face planter with a pretty, lavender-tinged creeper of some sort
One last look at the pond garden on my way out
In a patch of oakleaf hydrangea stands another eye-catching sculpture of Tom’s — The Arduous Journey, a wizened tree trunk into whose fissures Tom glued asphalt paving gravel he picked up from the street and painted gold.
Pat and Tom — thank you for another wonderful garden visit!
I’ll leave you with a streetside view of the garden, where ‘Green Goblet’ agave provides evergreen structure among spring-flowering red poppies.
For a look back at Part 1 of my visit to Tom’s garden, including his pond garden and spuria iris collection, click here.
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