Pearl Fryar's Topiary Garden

A former cornfield in Bishopville, South Carolina, holds a three-acre garden of sculpted trees and shrubs, made by a man who had no horticultural experience when he began.

Pearl Fryar cleared the land at his home in the early 1980s, according to the garden's website; South Carolina Public Radio dates his purchase of the plot to 1980. Many of the plants were rescued from nursery compost piles, and he worked on the garden while holding a full-time manufacturing job. The Garden Conservancy says he set out to win the local garden club's Yard of the Month award, and that the property grew to hold hundreds of trees and shrubs. Media attention followed in the early 1990s, when the media began featuring his "Love, Peace and Goodwill" plant carvings, and a 2006 documentary, A Man Named Pearl, brought his story to a wider audience.