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At first glance, the garden of Sha6ron Nelson-Vaux is the expected sweep of beautiful colors tucked into a rural landscape near Altoona. A windmill topped with a cutout weathervane of a dancing girl presides over all — the inspiration for the name of the place: Dancing Lady Gardens. But look closer. And talk with Sha6ron a bit. You’ll discover a deeper, richer, and more complex side — a side that Sha6ron, with her gray upswept hair and disarming resemblance to the perfect grandmother, relishes with a merry laugh.

First, though, let’s explain the name. Sha6ron has struggled her entire life with a reading disability. Letters confound and irritate her. As she neared 40, she decided to share her frustration. She threw the number 4 into the middle of her name, just to puzzle others and help them understand what it’s like for her. When she turned 50, the numerical addition was changed into a 5. And now, at age 64, she’s settled on a 6 for a while.

“It’s a good sorting device,” says Sha6ron. The odd spelling lets her find out a lot about a person the instant he or she encounters her name. “Some people don’t like to deal with that sort of distortion,” she explains. “And it gives me carte blanche to be an annoying person.”

Her garden is equally irreverent.

Both Beauties and Bullies

Approaching the house from the road, you’ll see a prairie garden, filled with native plants such as partridge pea (Chamaecrista fasciculate), Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum), purple coneflower (Echinacea), goatsbeard (Aruncus), milkweed (Asclepias), and a variety of grasses. In the spring it could be mistaken for a rough lawn. But lawns, says Sha6ron, “are just places where someone is too lazy to put in a garden or flower bed.”

Across the drive from the house stretch 18 50-foot rows of hundreds of different daylilies, all shapes and colors. Sha6ron points out the amazing array of different types of daylilies (which she, in true connoisseur fashion, calls simply “hems,” short for Hemerocallis). She also highlights the way that each flower blooms for only one day. “It is said that hems serve to remind us that we should enjoy the beauty of today and know that tomorrow is a brand-new choice for beauty.”

There’s an old sheep shed that Sha6ron and her husband, Steve, have turned into a shade house by ripping off two walls and replacing the solid roof with lath. The open sidesare curtained here and there with giant open-work iron panels — scrap cutouts brought home from Steve’s work at a company that makes carwash machines. The old dirt floor of the shed is planted with an incredible variety of hostas and other shade-loving plants, such as Japanese wax bells (Kirengeshoma), wood poppies (Stylophorum diphyllum), Canadian and European ginger (Asarum canadense, Asarum europaeum), variegated Solomon’s-seal (Polygonatum).

Near the house there’s a fragrance garden, dominated in June by an intensely fragrant dark red rugosa rose, its name long forgotten, says Sha6ron. A 15-foot-long open-work fence provides the architecture for her Great Wall of Clematis, cloaked with about a dozen different types. A shade border combines plenty of hosta with cowslips (Primula veris), one of the few primulas that do well in Iowa. The grasses garden grows six different types of Miscanthus, various Pennisetum, five different feather reed grasses (Calamagrostis), and — one of Sha6ron’s favorites — a variegated oat grass (Arrhenatherum) just 6 inches high. A new “baby” shrub border contains mainly dwarf-type shrubs — dwarf forsythia and a dwarf butterfly bush (Buddleia), a Shropshire plum tree (Prunus insititia ‘Shropshire’ damson’) that doesn’t get taller than 5 feet, and two smaller types of chokeberry (Aronia).

With reverence for all nature has to offer, Sha6ron has devoted soil even to the ruffians of the Iowa landscape. Her “Gar-Den of Thugs” is a collection of invasive plants, including forget-me-nots (Myosotis), a comfrey (Symphytum) so tough Sha6ron sometimes contains it with Roundup, and variegated smartweed (Polygonum). They’re all tucked under a white pine, where the dry shade keeps them in check.

A rock bed shows off another of Sha6ron’s collections. Her parents were rock hounds and she has spent a lifetime collecting even more. “I love that they’re wonderfully ancient and permanent,” says Sha6ron. Plus, she adds, they’re practical. In their tiny little spot, they act as mulch. “You never have to weed a rock.”

Stop by the chicken range, a charming little henhouse filled with a couple dozen fancy designer chickens. Crested Polish, Black Stars, and Auracanas flaunt fabulous colors, plumes, and combs. Chickens are perfect for her garden, explains Sha6ron. “They dispose of my garbage for me by eating it. And they create wonderful manure. And we get great colored eggs from them, with wonderful culinary possibilities.”

At the far edge of the property, in the lowest point, Sha6ron and Steve have encouraged a prairie pothole by digging the low spot deeper. It fills with water most springs and during wet spells and, like a bog, is a haven for frogs, other amphibians, and wetlands creatures.

Loss and Renewal

Dominating the landscape is the old windmill, underplanted with what Sha6ron calls the Bed of Giants — a bed full of large-scale plants like castor bean (Ricinus communis), elephant’s ear (Colocasia esculenta), and tall, rangy jewels of opar (Talinum paniculatum). At the structure’s peak, the seemingly playful dancing girl weathervane spins in the wind. It’s no piece of nostalgic kitsch, though. It is an homage, designed by Sha6ron, to a friend who died too young.

Death and loss are frequent themes in Sha6ron’s art, fascinating bits of which are found throughout the garden. She says she’s lost a lot of people in her life, and her art — and even her garden — reflect that.
Her first garden, in fact, ended up as a painful loss. She and Steve moved to the Altoona area back in 1996, when they were forced off property near Grimes. They had lived on the acreage since 1970, taking decades to landscape it impressively. They were renting but hoped to one day inherit the land. Instead, it was sold for development.

So Sha6ron and Steve pulled up roots, literally, and moved more than 3,000 plants to Altoona—an exhausting undertaking. Their new home unfortunately included terrible clay soil. Sha6ron had labored long and hard to develop gorgeous soil in her previous garden, and she decided she was not about to lose that, too. So she and Steve paid to have the top foot or so of soil scraped off and hauled — 17 truckloads — to the new place in Altoona. There she used the piles of soil to create a series of “lump” gardens, or berms. Gradually Sha6ron and Steve turned the former sheep farm into a dazzling display of flower and ornamental beds and borders. And art.

A largely self-taught artist, Sha6ron enjoys making “large, satirical things.” Some are in her garden; some are indoors. She also has a way with iron, taking chunks of salvage and turning it into garden art. She has several of what she calls “borgs” in her garden, creatures made by slipping scrap metal over iron fence posts. She also likes to call them “scarechildren” because, though she doesn’t have any crows to scare off, they do seem to be effective in frightening children.

As she gets older, Sha6ron bemoans the huge amount of physical labor her garden demands. But it has become such a part of her and such a large-scale expression of everything her rich mind has wrought, it’s hard to imagine her living any other way.

Explore Further

Dancing Lady Gardens is located on the southeast edge of Altoona and can be visited by appointment (phone 515-967-0947). Sha6ron and Steve hold an annual “garden viewing” event and open their gardens to hundreds of visitors.

Plants are sold at Dancing Lady Gardens by appointment and at Des Moines’ Downtown Farmers’ Market, where Sha6ron sells cut flowers (her lisanthus is a favorite) and unusual potted perennials.