At that point, Williams and Robert Reimer, head gardener on her property, started the process of reclaiming a long-overlooked point of land. To create space and liberate a stand of existing apple trees, they removed invasive species, then planted oat grass, bird-friendly scrub plants, and fruit-bearing pawpaw trees. To create the neighborhood, she had uniform posts made—tall, “so that you look up at them,” each wrapped with a metal band to deter ambitious squirrels from climbing too high and disturbing the tenants she had in mind. Finally, up went the houses, now totaling 17.
The attraction had nothing to do with value or pedigree. “Most of these birdhouses are sort of folk art,” she says. “They were somebody having fun building an unusual structure.” Not Monticello in miniature, not a replica of someone’s own house, just unknown makers, each with “an eye and a kind of humor,” none of them trying to be perfect. The proof is in the details: the gingerbread scallops on one many-holed high-rise (“somebody had a great time with their little saw”), the thatched-roof cottage she prizes because she has never seen another like it, the weather vane crowning the would-be dacha.
