When most of us plant our gardens, we choose the plants we want. Tony Avent has one up on all of us: He can create the plants he wants. Avent nurtures and breeds more than 28,000 types of flora at his Plant Delights Nursery and Juniper Level Botanic Garden, a pocket of land on Raleigh’s southern edge. Having bred and collected plants since he was 5 years old, Avent has amassed one of the largest plant collections on the planet. He’s plucked strange and astonishing species from all over the state and world and brought them to his nursery, where life grows extraordinary.

Tony Avent — holding a recently plucked weed, naturally — stands beside a Radiant Red rhododendron. photograph by Stacey Van Berkel

“I always wanted to be a gardener,” he says. “Just a crazy plant gardener.”

Much of the botanical garden celebrates the riot of life that can grow in the shade of old oaks with branches swooping low, gathering the light before it hits the ground. On hot days, it can feel 20 degrees cooler wandering these shadowed paths. You experience the unexpected revelation of beings that thrive away from the sun. Sometimes, when we let in a little darkness, the world opens up to greet us in more interesting ways.

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Avent grew up paying attention to life green and growing. He wandered his neighborhood in Raleigh, marveling over the weeds and noticing differences in the dirt. Before he started grammar school, he made terrariums and soil scenes to sell to neighbors and his parents’ friends.

“I knew where every color of soil was,” Avent says. He gathered the oranges, yellows, blacks, and grays of Raleigh’s earth. “I’d sift them and make really cool scenes to sell.”

He collected and sold African violets, too.

A stroll beneath the grotto waterfall in Juniper Level Botanic Garden offers a shady respite from the heat and a peek at fragrant hidden blooms. photograph by Stacey Van Berkel

“People’d be knocking on the doors during dinner: ‘I want to buy some plants!’ So I’d get up from the dinner table and walk them through the greenhouse and sell them plants,” Avent says.

From home to the Raleigh Flea Market, from the Raleigh Flea Market to the little house he shared with his late wife, Michelle, on Dixie Trail near NC State’s campus, Avent gathered, grew, and sold plants. At the Dixie Trail house, he and Michelle set up a visitor registry and let people tour their yard. He sold plants out of their driveway on the weekends.

Then, almost 40 years ago, the Avents bought a two-acre tobacco field and farmhouse.

“They had just cut the crops. The tobacco stubble was there. There was nutsedge and wire grass,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve dealt with tobacco soil, but it’s dead.”

Throughout the spring and summer, blooming flowers fill the garden with color. photograph by Stacey Van Berkel

To create new life in a dead land, you start from the ground up. At the time, Avent was working at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, where he set up a free compost pile for Raleighites. “Every day at lunch, I’d load up my pickup with mulch. Every night, I’d bring it home and pile it up,” he says. “It just built up over a period of years.”

In those years, “we scared off all the neighbors,” he jokes, which allowed him to amass 28 acres to build his nursery and botanical garden. Dwight Holland, curator of design at the North Carolina Zoo, came and built a waterfall aimed at the Avents’ bedroom window to block the sound of passing traffic. The Avents removed the house next door and smashed its foundation to build a 300-foot crevice garden, where succulents now peek out between cracks. Today, Avent’s gardens look more like an exotic sanctuary than a tobacco field.

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Twice a season, Avent opens Plant Delights and Juniper Level to the public. His cats, Jasper and Kit Kat, twine their tails through an aquatic garden and hop onto a bridge to greet guests. Near the bridge, carnivorous pitcher plants open their deadly, quiet maws to the sky. They capture their own seeds in pans hung beneath their petals like balance scales.

As visitors wander the garden’s eight acres, they can feel their footsteps crunch on rocks, shush on mulch, pad on earth, and crumble on gravel. They may smell the chocolate flowers, which look like black-eyed Susans and have the aroma of milk chocolate, that Avent harvested in Texas. They might find Himalayan lilies with curled tendrils searching for purchase. They can see one of the property’s original trees, which twists and bends with the gardens built around it. They can discover succulents ruffled like Elizabethan collars, purple jack-in-the-pulpits from China, and living stones from the African desert.

Come July, visitors may see one of Avent’s agaves flowering. Agaves have thick slabs of leaves that block the sun from the ground below. When they bloom, they erect a 15- to 30-foot stalk that shoots to the sky, releasing cataracts of yellow blossoms, heavy with nectar at the top. Avent’s crew climbs a narrow ladder to pollinate the flowers, waving away the hundreds of bees that lift off, syrup dripping from their insectile faces.

“My workers are like King Kong up there, swatting airplanes,” he says. “And the bees, my gosh, they’re thrilled beyond belief.”

Those who can’t make it to the garden during open days can order plants from one of Avent’s famous — and, thanks to their creative illustrations, sometimes infamous — catalogs that arrive at doorsteps around the world.

Rare and unusual plants, like a budding agave (left) and a blooming iris, show off at Juniper Level Botanic Garden. photograph by Tony Avent, Stacey Van Berkel

Avent has no children. He has given his gardens to NC State to continue his conservation work and breeding programs, like the 30-year hosta program that’s wrapping up, and to keep safe the life he’s gathered and invented.

Some agave species bloom once in their long lives. Then, they die. In the wild, it might take a hundred years. Under Avent’s care, it can take 15. Plants require forbearance, and gardens require foresight. This world was made to grow and fall, and to grow again. Avent has watched the cycle since he was 5 years old. He knows what to expect. He knows how to flourish.

“Oh my gosh,” he says as he stands in his verdant old tobacco field, with its waterfalls and valleys. “It’s wonderful.”

Annual memberships to Juniper Level Botanic Garden are available for purchase. Members have access to classes, garden tours, plant discounts, and free entry to other gardens across the United States. For more information, visit juniperlevelbotanicgarden.org.