From bright flowers, sparkly tinsel, small windmills, eccentric figurines, and vibrant trinkets, 77-year-old Tony Kurz's garden is a chaos of colours.
Starting work on his multi-hued garden in January, Kurz said that he began by adding colour inside his home, but later decided that he needed to move outside.
“I’m a real do-it-yourself person and I just love colour so much. I went to church one day and I feel like God just gave me the inspiration and the strength to brighten everything up a bit,” said Kurz, who has lived in his Vincent home for the last 20 years and was previously a farmer in Macleantown.
Now a pensioner, Kurz spends his days in his garden planting flowers, making things and decorating his world.
“I was a real plant lover back in my day. I stopped gardening for a while but I’m back now and I love it. You can never have enough plants or colour,” Kurz smiled.
His home is filled with vibrant objects; from balloons and fairy wings to small water features, stickers and garlands, something vivid features on every wall and in every room of the house. And his garden is just the same.
Adorned with roses of every shade, perfect poinsettias, bright begonias, and even a ponytail palm decorated like an absurd Christmas tree, Kurz’s once dull concrete yard is now anything but grey.
Statues including a bunny with blue feet and a yellow nose, a dassie sporting green ears and a meerkat in a sequined bowtie and flamboyant hat can be seen in-between the pretty plants.
Wind chimes hang from above, tickling in the breeze and tiny windmills offer up an appealing chromatic blur in the wind.
“My favourite things are the windmills. I just love how they move in the wind and I can see all of them from my window in the lounge,” said Kurz, who has added more than 10 small to medium paper and metal windmills to his garden.
Painted rocks, crazy creations and a kaleidoscope of knick-knacks are placed around the yard, making it feel like a wonderland.
“It’s all my own creation and I’ve used things I’ve found lying around at home or things I’ve seen and really liked from different shops. I’ve even put a few SA flags up, and I’ve used some fake flowers and plants too so there’s colour all year round,” said Kurz.
His front wall also shows off a multi-coloured metal owl whose head spins when the winds pick up. Kurz said he spent weeks welding colourful metal shapes onto the owl’s head in order to make it turn in the wind. “It took me forever to get this owl’s head to turn. I could just never get the pieces right, but now his head turns properly when the winds are strong and it’s wonderful to see,” said Kurz.Every feature brings Kurz joy, but he says that his favourite section of the garden is the one that contains gnomes.“I just love that corner and how full of life it is. I was looking for statues at a nursery and I came across these colourful gnomes and they just work so well,” he said happily.While Kurz is not creating rainbow-like gimmicks or keeping his garden tidy, he can be found tending to his canaries or bonding with his green Jardine Parrot, Rudy, and says that his birds give him just as much, if not more, pleasure as his garden does.He prides himself on keeping the garden as neat and tidy as possible and hoped it would bring as much joy to others as it did to him.“It’s purely for my own enjoyment and it keeps my mind and my hands busy, but I’ve had lots of people walk past and comment on the garden, they all seem to like it too,” said Kurz. “This is what my Heaven looks like and if it makes other people happy too then that’s wonderful.”Kurz’s home is in Edkins Road in Vincent and his garden can be admired from the street...