A brightly yellow painted home with green trim and an eclectic garden attracted the attention of people in town for the Taste of Hamburg-er Festival on Sept. 3.
The garden’s creator Bill Rhodes and his girlfriend Jan Sterba welcomed visitors to tour their unique yard that features mosaics, recycled items and art.
“It’s fun. It is an expression of life,” said Bill. “I have a lot of people that come by. Their kids will come in and play with the stuff. That’s what it’s for. It’s like a little play land.”
He did receive a few complaints about his green painted sidewalks with a yellow painted path. Much of the painting on the house and sidewalks was done by a painter.
“I think a sidewalk is like having a car that’s just primered and you don’t paint it. People who invented concrete painted all their concrete and that was the Italians and the Romans 1,000 years ago. It’s just that it all wore off and now we’re just too lazy to paint our sidewalks.”
Describing himself as a workaholic, the garden gives him something to do.
“It beats looking at a little black box all the time or a computer.”
Much of the garden is his creation. Bill bought the corner house about 12 years ago.
“When I bought it, it was falling down so I really changed the whole thing.”
Since then Bill has been renovating the building, which is an ongoing process, and started creating the garden adding recycled items and plants over the years.
“I actually went to school to be an architect, but at the same time I worked at the Three Mile Island when they were building,” he said.
Making so much in construction at Three Mile Island he veered from his architecture studies and pursued construction instead. Today, he is a retired pile driver who now does fabrication work and works with apprentices.
“Now I’m 70 and I wish I was an architect,” he said.
Bill always had an art background and studied art even while studying architecture. Today, he teaches welding at an art program at Snow Farm, a nonprofit elder hostel in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. There are art pieces by other artists on display in their garden, some created during his art classes.
In the garden, visitors will find statues, mosaic art and recycled items such as wheels, wagons and toys, to name a few of the items planted within the flowers, tall grasses, bushes and ornamental trees.
“This is just an expression. I go to flea markets and I buy junk that nobody else wants and put it together and turn it into something. It’s recycling. And this is just fun.”
His girlfriend Jan said she never created any art until she met Bill three years ago. Now she creates mosaics and stepping stones to add to the garden’s ever building collection.
Jan pointed out two giraffes, Daisy and Marius, the second named in honor of an 18-month-old giraffe named Marius who was put down at Copenhagen Zoo and fed to the lions.
She eagerly showed off another project of pride, a work in progress on a wall of an owl in a tree, using tile, stone, broken glass and bark.
“I like the creativity of it,” she said. “We have fun. We really enjoy it. It keeps us active at our age.”
“You have to have something in life to do,” said Bill. “I tell kids, pick yourself a hobby. You need that. It’s therapeutic for your mind to have a hobby, to do something. It doesn’t matter if you draw stick people.”
Bill also sees working on his house and garden as a benefit to the community.
“If we all work on our properties just a little bit and take care of them it makes everybody’s place just a little worth more money,” said Rhodes. “Not only that, it makes for a nice community. We live as a team. We need to work together.”
He sees his neighbors taking care of their homes and gardens.
“As a community we need to take care of our places, that way it’s a nice place to live.”