The Mancuso garden in Atascadero: A magical and enchanted place

Have you ever wanted to walk right into the magical and inviting pages of a childhood storybook?

Ginny Mancuso’s “Enchanted Garden” in Atascadero provides that visit for the guest, with its castle wall, Mad Hatter tea party table, leprechaun trail, hammock haven and fairy godmother sanctuary. Each area of the garden tells its own unique story, making it delightfully surprising.

It’s all the work of one creative and talented woman. Besides designing and constructing the charming scenario areas of her yard, Ginny’s main interest is in creating concrete sculpture.

Ginny has developed a love and talent for fabricating naturallooking concrete benches, stone walls, steps, handrails, tree stumps, and much more.

With her own concrete mixer, a strong helper for the wheelbarrow and her intense imagination, she uses her skills as a painter to bring the completed concrete structure to new life through faux finishes. At that point, it truly becomes concrete art.

Mancuso said her creativity began as a little girl, with a talented cabinet-maker father and an ingenious mother.

“If my mother didn’t have what she needed, she figured out a way to just make it out of what she had around the house,” she explained. She has followed her mother’s example. As one friend wrote, “Ginny has the ability to discern the artistic nature of nearly any and every object that comes into her life.”

Ginny has a name for the donated and discarded objects she uses as the base for her concrete art. She humorously calls it, “rubble without a cause.”

Underneath one artistic wall is an old wheelbarrow, broken plastic patio chairs, lamp parts and mismatched used bricks. After creating the desired shape with the items, she covers them with chicken wire and burlap bags, then a foundational concrete base coat, which is then textured to hold the final concrete layer.

Friends throughout the years have gifted much of the garden art, or “found object art,” to Ginny.

With her active imagination she combines the old items to repurpose them, such as her elegant old world street lamp formed from a broken birdbath, fountain base, reclaimed pipe and a recycled outdoor light fixture.

Mancuso has installed lighting throughout the yard and in the trees, keeping the magic alive at night.

Mancuso purchased the property with its large shady oaks in 1977, and lived for several years in the original house, which she says was “not much more than a chicken coop.”

In 1986 she built what she called a proper house for herself and her young daughter. The mature trees and shrubs in the yard now provide the enchanted for est setting for her whimsical trails and pathways. There is even a shady nook with a functioning old bathtub complete with hot water. Special little seats for her grandchildren now adorn the playful garden “rooms.”

Throughout the deep and private yard are color spots of annual flowers, California poppies, calendulas and lilies. The planting scheme is random, adding to a spontaneous sense of discovery and mystery.

As an artist, always popping up with new ideas, Ginny is constantly at work on a project in her “Enchanted Garden.” As she said, it always has and will continue to be a work-in-progress.

This story was originally published April 4, 2012 at 5:35 AM with the headline "The Mancuso garden in Atascadero: A magical and enchanted place."