In the Victorian era, follies were a common feature in formal gardens. A folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration but suggesting, through its appearance, some other purpose. Nineteenth-century English gardens and French landscape gardening often featured mock Roman temples, symbolizing classical virtues. Other 18th-century garden follies represented temples, pyramids or ruined abbeys.
I had always wanted my own folly — a ruin, precisely — but I had to tear apart one folly to get the type I had wanted all along.
The original folly was a patio I’d built on the side of the house. I’d bought a two-by-three plastic mold which, when filled with cement, looked like Belgian paving stones.
Each molding required an 80-pound bag of cement, each of which I emptied into the wheelbarrow, mixed with a hoe, toted it to its place and filled the mold. Since the patio layout of my dreams was about 20 feet square, the cement work took two summers of hard labor.
When I had finished, I had a handsome, but ultimately unusable, piazza. In the summer the place baked all day—even with a canopy, not a hospitable place for a get-togethe​​r or barbecue.
It sat unused for several years before I decided to tear my labors apart. I took away enough squares, about half of my piazza, to build a serpentine wall out back. Tired or lazy, I left the rest and planted flowers and grasses, never giving the place another thought before I discovered I had the ruin I always wanted.
The concrete pavers had aged to ancient, marble blocks strewn about accrued meaning; flowers and plants sprung up in the cracks just as they would have in any ancient forum.​​​​
