The former garden is beautiful in its wildness. Without someone to maintain them, what must have once been meticulously cared for rows have broken free from flower beds and careful pruning and succumbed to the wild ecstasy of nature. The bushes are buzzing with bees and hummingbirds. Butterflies and dragonflies flutter and dart, and small gray lizards race away from my feet. Tiny brown and yellow songbirds leap from branch to branch as I push through a riot of flowers and greenery. The plants have grown massive in the years this place has been abandoned, flourishing in the sun and rain.

The path through the garden remains, wide paving stones blocking growth, but the flowering bushes have spread their branches across it, and smaller plants poke their green heads up through the gaps. The bird bath, filled in with dirt, has found itself repurposed as a planter. Long green tendrils covered with buds trail down from it. The fountain is a plant-choked pool, its central statue cracked and fallen. As I peer between the green mats that cover its surface I see tadpoles darting.

I turn a corner and find myself face to face with a deer. It stares at me, head raised, before turning and bounding away along the path. As I look closer, many of the plants have been eaten, by deer and rabbits and insects, but they are poor gardeners compared to a determined human and a pair of shears, and their feeding has done little to curtail the garden’s rampant growth.

The path leads me to a greenhouse. It rises above the overgrown bushes and must once have been the pride of this garden. Now, though its metal framework is largely intact, many of its glass panes are cracked. A tree that took root in one corner has grown through the roof, and the walls are covered with vines. As I step through the missing door, I hear scurrying in the gloom. A rabbit darts between my legs, racing past me to the freedom and danger of the sunlit world outside.

Inside, the symphony of bees and birdsong and rustling leaves is muted. The broad leaves of the ivy and the spreading tree branches shade the greenhouse, and even where the glass is uncovered, its dirty, stained panes let in little light. Dead leaves crunch and crumble under my feet. The greenhouse, once full of sunlight and warmth, has become the domain of things that prefer the shade. Some small plants have taken root in the abandoned flower beds, their wide, dark leaves searching for what light makes it to them. Pale mushrooms cluster on decaying wooden planters.

A wheelbarrow lies on its side in a corner, the wheel decayed and a hole rusted in the bottom. Other tools lay scattered about, wood handles rotted and metal taken over by rust: shovels, rakes, trowels, buckets. A pair of gloves crumbles at my touch, and insects wriggle away from the disturbance.

I leave the quiet gloom of the greenhouse to return to the sunlit celebration of the garden. I am careful to step only on the broken paving stones, my feet avoiding the plants. As I leave, I close the gate behind me, though the wall it was a part of has since collapsed under nature’s onslaught. The house, too, is in ruin, conquered by rain and trees and ivy. Now that spring has returned, everything seems to be making up for lost time, and nature is beautiful in her wild exultation.