BONUS: Paradise Garden

That entire year was dedicated to artists from Georgia, and I became obsessed with a story

“of a totally self-taught outsider who came from a place called Summerville.”

I learned that in Summerville, this man had created the kind of oasis, a rural Eden, built with scraps and bare hands. A place called Paradise Garden.

It was only an hour and a half drive away from where I lived. The second I got my driver's license,

that was the first place I went. I saw it out, I had to. Paradise Garden isn't exactly a place you stumble upon. It sits on a former swamp, near the Tennessee border, and it's tucked away in an unassuming neighborhood. Just like the Georgia guidestones. You kind of have to know where you're going to get there. But unlike the Georgia guidestones, Paradise Garden is still here, and it looks really good.

As you drive through that unassuming neighborhood, something like a wonky, multi-tiered, shiny, wedding cake comes into view. It's a chapel. Today, as the production team drives up, we see the metal covering the steeple, sparkling in the sun. The guidestones were mysterious and ominous. With so many theories about their true origins. Paradise Garden isn't hiding

“anything. It's welcoming. Magical. I always wondered, could the guidestones have avoided their fate?”

If they were more like this place. Friends, your paradise garden art in the learning center. Look, so yeah, you've been on all these things. Look at this. This is the chapel when I was here last, like you couldn't even get near it. It was crumbling to the ground. Oh, really? I'm going inside now. So sick. He built that thing. Yeah. Like, by hand, with...

Howard's gone now. But the people who work at Paradise Garden try to keep his spirit alive. Like, the gardens executive director, Davia Weatherdale. It was great. How are you? I'm going to keep a way around. This is what you see. This is one of my colleagues, dogs.

And Howard first who loved animals. He had a peek on here at one point.

Oh, wow. We have two cats, it's Calvin and Hobbs. There's a real stray cat problem up here. Davia leads us through the gift shop. To meet two of the people who have spent a lot of their time trying to preserve Howard's vision for Paradise Garden. My name is Eddie Whillingham and I served as a general contractor on the restoration of the World's Folk Art Church at Howard Fenster's Paradise Garden.

My name is Donnie Davis, operations coordinator. Paradise Garden Foundation. Howard was a pastor right here in Summerville. With only a sixth grade education, he spent most of his days preaching and repairing bicycles in his community. Until one day, a religious awakening changed his life and this patch of land forever. It really does feel like a strange sort of paradise.

One that was clearly built by human hands. These hands cared very much. It's a labor of love. Crooked mosaics blanket the sidewalks. Wobbly letters are scribbled across walls. There's art everywhere. Since I last visited about 15 years ago or so, Paradise Garden has gone through a major restoration.

“I see so many things I remember. But now there's somehow more vibrant and more real.”

The big story we like and we went into the crawl space underneath and we thought it was just a bunch of debris. We pulled out any bicycle rooms. I was 7,100, 800. Yeah. He actually repaired my bicycle when I was a kid. That's a good story to tell. A bicycle is actually where this whole thing started.

One day, when Howard was painting one of the bikes he was repairing, Howard said he had a vision. Some of the wet paint got on his finger and as Howard tells it, that paint informed a face. The face looked at Howard and told him to paint a sacred art. A man of faith, Howard saw this as a mandate from heaven. He wasted no time. His new life, his new purpose would start now. He took his tools, the ones he used to repair bikes and everything else.

Dump them on the ground and mixed wet cement over them. Never to be used again.

From now on, Howard would only make art. So he pulled out a bill in his wallet and it was of George Washington who always admired as a kid and he tried to draw it. And then he tried to draw it again.

So that was the moment he had there and so you'll see Washington throughout our garden.

“You see a lot of George Washington's, but also a lot of Santa Claus's,”

Elvis's and Coca-Cola bottles. It's pure Americana. You can also see Howard's tools hardened into one of the sidewalks that weave through the property. Thanks to Howard's vision from God, Paradise Garden is now a living, breathing art. We do find pieces and we have an archives here that's fairly extensive. We want to try to keep as much as Howard's hand as possible in the garden. Right at the heart of the garden,

is that building we saw from the road when we drove up. The one that looks like a structurally unsound wedding cake baked by a free spirited intern. And it's sort of the centerpiece of the art compound that is Paradise Garden. It's a church building that Howard bought and then added floor after floor with his own hands, piece by piece, in his Howard way of doing it. The world folk art church is really two things. It's a work of art itself, but also a kind of

monument to Howard's oddities. Every day objects he found beautiful, but also his paintings, carvings, installations, coffee cans filled with buttons, how it rarely slept, painting day and night, on anything and everything. Howard was told by God that he needed to do 5,000 paintings originally. And so that's when he started numbering his paintings. He paid 46,997. 91. 91. 41. 46,991 paintings. Howard would take everyday items and refashion them in

strange ways, like making a Christmas tree out of bicycle rims, recovering an old wooden cross

and used turf grass and toy soldiers. He was a child of the depression, so I never threw anything

away, right? And so he used what he had and he collected what he called inventions of mankind. And this is just a little sample of his collections. Howard obviously had some niche interests. jars of tonsils and Barbie dolls. Bibalverse and sermons scribbled everywhere. Apparently some of this chapter and verse he quotes from the Bible is entirely his own creation, part of his own fantastical world. On the flip side, did he ever attract like bad attention or people who felt like

he was misrepresenting the Bible or something or I don't know if he ever attracted that kind of like I'd been thinking about this a lot. What other people thought of Paradise Garden? Was it like the guidestones polarizing mysterious place? It's a niche market. It's not for everybody. It's not

Disney World, but the people love it, love it. When I first heard about the guidestones, I immediately

thought about Paradise Garden and Howard Finster, someone who also had a calling, an uncontrollable drive to make some monumental work of art. But now I'm thinking Howard Finster was more like the opposite of artsy Christian. But I guess one of the things I can say about Howard did high-experienced dam have heard from most people that talked about him. He was no respect for a person. He didn't care if he was a better on the street or if he was the president, he treated you the same.

“I think it's probably one of the reasons like the difference. I mean the guidestones was built by”

an someone who remained anonymous and mysterious and so that creates more space to misinterpret and misunderstand and things evil or something if there's no warm face behind it, you know? Like like here. Davia, Eddie and Donnie lead us outside and over to see one of Howard's workshops on the property. We've already been walking around Paradise Garden for the better part of an hour. Just when I think I'd seen it all, there's another door to another room filled with even more wonders.

What is that? An alligator here. An alligator skeleton? Yes. What's that? Don't know. No comment. Really? What is that? What am I looking at? This is a two-headed baby doll. Outside in the garden, Howard's creation continues. It feels endless. What's going on here?

“So this was a a dentist I believe Dr. Harden. I believe he was a dentist but I could be”

incorrect about that. Found this body when he was restoring an old home here in Trion. They dated a body back to the Civil War and they believe it was a 16-year-old female. Dr. Harden was friends with Howard Finster and so he brought her to Howard for the final resting place

to be able to see inside. Yeah, there's a little port you could look to and see your teeth.

“There are places in the world that feel different. Places where there's only a thin veil”

separating the physical world and the spiritual world. Or there's some intangible feeling

that you can tap into things. Heritage Garden is one of those places. The hollowed ground beneath

“the guidestones is another. Georgia seems to have a lot of these places. Howard Finster and”

RC Christian were different in so many ways but they both created their own portals and I guess they

were both prophets in their own way. He considered himself never. He wanted to sort of warn people

“about things coming to an end on a way. He said he was from another world and so he dreamed about”

another world that could be here on earth. Howard, he likes his being here. I'd like to thank he does.