Everett woman creates a garden of wacky delights

It looks like a yard sale on steroids.

The lawn is covered with jewelry, lamps, clocks, poker chips, piggy banks, doodads, dominoes, decor and decorations.

But there’s no braking to buy, only braking to gape.

What’s up with that?

It’s Jacquelyn Dreyer’s humdinger of a display garden.

Dreyer called me a few weeks ago and invited me to her Everett home to see her yard, promising me I was in for something I’d never seen before.

“People stop to take pictures,” she said. “Every year, I have people say to me, ‘How come The Herald hasn’t come out?’”

She told me she had 57 bowling balls in her yard, 52 hula hoops in a monkey tree, CDs covering another tree like a disco ball and … well, that’s all I needed to hear. I said I’d be right over.

When I stepped out of the car, onto a big yellow duck painted onto her red driveway, I blinked in disbelief to diminish the glow of the disco ball tree and the prismatic lights flashing from hundreds of glass items covering the ground.

“I told you you’d never seen anything like this,” she said.

Yep. She was right. Not in my wildest drunken state.

She could have added: “You think that’s something? You should see the back yard.”

That’s where the bowling balls and a monkey tree are. And there’s even grass.

In the garage is her Chevy Astro van festooned with smiley stickers and a giant stuffed Pink Panther in the front passenger seat. It’s a wheeled version of her front yard. She dresses the part in colorful clothes and, though it’s now gray, had purple hair for years before it was fashionable and was nicknamed “Purple-haired Lady.”

OMG, how had she stayed under the The Herald’s radar all these years?

Dreyer, 73, and her husband, Loren, had one of the first houses in the quiet bedroom community west of Evergreen Way and north of the Boeing Freeway.

“That was 1964,” she said. “We were in construction so we helped work on them. We did concrete finishing.”

She said her front yard started out cookie-cutter, with grass and trees, and it stayed that way for decades.

“I started playing with it about 10 years ago,” she said.

She replaced the grass with black crushed rock and stained the driveway and walk bright red.

Then she started adding things. Much of it is from binges at thrift stores. Some things came from the house. “The dome is from the dining room light. The lamp is from a neighbor.”

A bench made out of horseshoes is from a yard sale.

There’s a basket of rocks. “I have a rock from every state of the United States and 32 countries,” she said. “I wrote to several colleges with lapidarians, and they mailed me some rocks.”

She said she lost her thumb “in a stupid accident with a hammer,” but it didn’t damper her determination.

She drilled and glued CDs together for the disco ball tree. She filled egg shells with concrete. “I shook the egg out, filled it full of concrete one drop at a time. You have to know how to mix it.”

The basketball she filled with concrete weighs 55 pounds.

“One year I had 11 things stolen,” she said. None were concrete things.

The benefits outweigh the risks of having such a showplace.

“People smile,” she said. “They come up the hill and they grin. It is amazing how happy it makes people feel.”

She’s not the only one keeping watch. There are two faces peering out the front window.

“That’s Pete and Elsie,” she said. “I made them from plywood and PVC pipe. You’d be surprised how many people think they are real. I had a cable guy tell me, ‘I looked up and almost wet my pants.’”

It’s a seasonal display, running March through October. Dreyer is not one to sit still. She hauls all the stuff into the house for the winter. Except for the bowling balls.

“The first year my husband said, ‘You’re not going to drag them all in the house, are you?’ We buried them in the ground. We never did mark where we put them. So he comes out that summer to rototill and he goes, ‘Where’s the bowling balls?’ At that time I think we only had 34.”

The hula hoop tree began innocently enough.

“I got started with one,” she said. “I stuck it on one of the branches and I said, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’”

Hoops begat more hoops.

“I went to the dollar store.”

How does she get the hoops up there? She makes it sound easy.

“I have a window-washing pole like professionals have. I made a hook on the end of it,” she said. “I have an 8-foot tall orchard ladder and I have a 6-foot tall neighbor.”

Sometimes, the hoops take a spin. “Those big winds we had, I had 24 hula hoops flying all over the place,” she said.

Otherwise, the hoops stay up all year. It’s a way to honor Loren.

She started the hoop tree after he died three years ago. She found her husband of 52 years dead in his favorite chair when she took him a snack while he was watching his Mariners play.

“He would have loved the hoops,” she said.

It helps her cope without him.

“I’m done,” she said. “For now.”

Andrea Brown at 425-339-3443; abrown@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @reporterbrown.