Happy Friday to the gardening community, and welcome back to the latest edition of the Garden Photo of the Day. With Halloween arriving tomorrow, the final post of the week offers a festive look back through past garden features to find inspiration rooted deeply in the spooky season. Over the years, dedicated
contributors to the series have continuously demonstrated that holiday decorating does not have to stop abruptly at the front door. Instead, outdoor spaces provide a vast canvas for imagination. A heavy morning fog can suddenly render a familiar backyard wonderfully eerie and atmospheric, homegrown pumpkins can be assembled into an entire cast of narrative characters, and delicate flowers and foliage gathered straight from the beds can elevate simple gourds into striking works of living art. Today, the focus returns to three distinctly different Halloween displays, each carrying its own unique charm, creative flair, and visual appeal.
The journey begins in Hebron, Kentucky, where Keri Shinault and her husband, Brandon, maintain a perfectly spooky garden that has become a seasonal tradition. The couple began hosting an annual Halloween masquerade following their October 2005 wedding, a celebration that eventually expanded to encompass the meticulous decoration of their entire home and surrounding landscape. Visitors to their property are met with an immersive environment featuring creepy critters, life-sized ghouls, weathered headstones, and plenty of other carefully placed spooky surprises designed to startle and delight.
Natural elements often play a starring role in these transformations. In one notable scene from the Kentucky property, a beautifully appointed outdoor sitting area surrounded by lush, vibrant plants becomes instantly more mysterious and dramatic when a dense morning fog rolls in, blurring the boundaries of the garden beyond and creating a cinematic backdrop. It serves as a reminder that sometimes Mother Nature herself provides the absolute best Halloween special effects, requiring very little human intervention to set a haunting mood.
Further into the landscape, whimsical touches balance the eerie atmosphere. A carefully positioned skeleton sits comfortably amidst the greenery, inviting passersby to take a load off their tired bones for a while. Navigating the property is equally atmospheric, with natural stepping stones set directly into lush, sprawling ground covers that gently guide visitors around massive oakleaf hydrangea shrubs. Known scientifically as Hydrangea quercifolia and thriving across USDA Hardiness Zones 5 through 9, these substantial shrubs offer magnificent foliage and structural presence that anchor the spooky path long after the growing season has peaked.
Moving away from traditional ghouls and graveyards, the tour next highlights the delightfully ridiculous pumpkin people created by Tom and Jeannie Tremont. Rather than settling for the conventional approach of simply lining a front porch with a row of harvested gourds, Tom and Jeannie chose to transform their homegrown pumpkins into an entire cast of distinct characters. Each figure is endowed with its own specific pose, carefully chosen props, and undeniable personality, turning a routine autumn harvest into a narrative-driven outdoor installation.
Why settle for a standard, static jack-o’-lantern when your pumpkins can seemingly go out for a bicycle ride? The Tremonts constructed elaborate tableaus where their pumpkin creations interact with everyday objects. In one particularly humorous composition, a pumpkin person appears to have been caught in a uniquely compromising situation—specifically with their pants down—while a family casually bicycles past in the background. The display is ridiculous in the absolute best possible way, eliciting chuckles and lighthearted amusement from anyone fortunate enough to walk or ride past the property.
Other scenes within the Tremont display lean into heartwarming domestic moments. A sweet mama-and-baby pumpkin pair stands out as a particular highlight of the installation, capturing the affection of neighbors and online observers alike. Even commenters on the original Garden Photo of the Day feature singled out this endearing little duo as a standout favorite, proving that autumn displays can successfully blend humor, storytelling, and undeniable charm without relying on traditional frights.
The seasonal tour concludes with something completely different, courtesy of Cherry Ong in Richmond, British Columbia. For her dazzling pumpkin display, Cherry cleverly repurposed the pallet-wood auricula theaters that she and her husband had originally constructed to showcase spring blooming plants. Auricula theaters are traditional structures designed primarily to protect sensitive auriculas—botanically known as Primula auricula and hardy in Zones 3 through 8—from the harsh beating of autumn and winter rain and wind. However, Cherry discovered that these architectural wooden shelving units make a remarkably spectacular fall display stage as well.
Cherry and her husband built the pallet-wood auricula theaters a couple of seasons prior, with her husband constructing and hanging the heavy boxes while Cherry personally designed and stained the wood to achieve a rustic, polished finish. When autumn arrives, the display shelves take on an entirely new look and purpose as vibrant pumpkins and unique squash varieties step in to take the place of delicate spring flowers.
Before giving many of the smaller pumpkins away, Cherry utilized old mini terra-cotta pots throughout the structure to add necessary height and visual variation to the shelves. Furthermore, she decorated select pumpkins with seasonal flowers and foliage freshly harvested from her own garden, effectively transforming the wooden theater into one massive, cohesive botanical arrangement. A small white pumpkin topped with intricate clusters of Chinese tea rosebuds demonstrates the remarkable level of detail Cherry brings to these seasonal creations. Elsewhere within the display, she also incorporated dried dahlias along with various other garden-grown flowers and foliage to enrich the textures and colors on the wooden stage.
These diverse installations highlight a broader truth about celebrating the season outdoors: there are remarkably few rigid rules when it comes to Halloween in the garden. Gardeners are free to embrace whichever aesthetic appeals to them most, whether that means going creepy, silly, purely beautiful, strictly botanical, or attempting a combination of all four approaches at once. As the season progresses and gardeners finalize their outdoor decorations, porches, containers, and homegrown pumpkin displays this weekend, the gardening community continues to celebrate the boundless creativity found in backyards everywhere.
We want to see YOUR garden!
Have photos to share? We would love to see your garden, a particular collection of plants you love, or a wonderful garden you had the chance to visit!
To submit, fill out the Garden Photo of the Day Submission Form.
You can also send 5 to 10 photos along with some information about the plants in the pictures and where you took the photos. We would love to hear where you are located, how long you have been gardening, successes you are proud of, failures you learned from, hopes for the future, favorite plants, or funny stories from your garden.
Do you receive the GPOD by email yet? Sign up here.
