Ellsworth Rock Garden, Minnesota

Built between 1944 and 1965, by Jack Ellsworth, a retired Chicago building contractor, this landscape park includes hundreds of rearranged and balanced rocks set on exposed granite outcrops and along pathways and terraces, next to the shore of Kabetogama Lake. He spent many of these 21 summers here, in a cabin, with his wife, building and planting gardens at the site, which is remarkable especially for its remoteness – surrounded by wilderness on the north shore of the lake, reachable only by a boat crossing over several miles, and just a few miles from the Canadian Border. Ellsworth died in 1974, and the National Park Service created Voyageur National Park the following year, which located the site inside the park grounds. Neglected for years, the Garden is now preserved and maintained by the Park Service.