My neighbor's garden is a wonder to behold. Where you might expect to find trim box hedges, bamboo fences, subtle rock arrangements, junipers, conifers and pine, there are garden gnomes, an ornamental concrete wheelbarrow, pots of begonia, hanging baskets of pansies and an iron rose trellis. At the end of the year, the garden is festooned with fairy lights and models of reindeer.

What, I often ponder, unable to keep my eyes off the compelling vision of a rubber flamingo gazing into a brick-lined well, could have possessed my neighbor to have extirpated the exquisite Japanese landscape that once existed here in favor of a fantasia of ersatz statuary?

Another neighbor suggested a possible explanation.