Itasca Rock Garden

A farmer who kept hitting rocks with his plough built a castle out of them, and a century later volunteers are keeping it alive.

According to CBS Minnesota in 2025, John Christensen was a Danish immigrant farming near the village of Itasca when he turned the stones in his fields into a garden. The Kohler Foundation says he built the 14,000-square-foot garden of castles, ponds, bridges and grottos over a decade or so beginning in 1925. CBS quotes a local history centre staff member saying the large castle was reminiscent of the castles he grew up with in Denmark, and describes a heart-shaped grotto and a home for Irg, the garden's resident gnome. The SPACES archive, citing a 1955 Albert Lea Tribune article, says the castle was first built as a root and vegetable cellar, and that the work later moved into the house basement, where one wall is signed in stone "J. S. Christensen 1938". Christensen died in 1939.