A bicycle repairman and preacher who turned to art to spread the word of God, Finster started building the garden in 1961 and filled it with quirky mosaics, sculptures, and buildings.
The nonprofit Paradise Gardens Park and Museum Inc. hopes to raise nearly $1 million to restore the crumbling four-acre plot - once featured in a 1983 R.E.M video - to its odd grandeur. But the group so far has raised only about $25,000 in the three years since it bought the garden from Finster's daughter.
The nonprofit has shored up the tier wedding cake-like World's Folk Art Church and put on a new roof with money raised by auctioning off art from the garden, said chairman Tommy Littleton. He's brought in a volunteer to run an art gallery and guide tours of the garden. And he's bought two goats - Lady and Loretta - to help keep the weeds and kudzu in check.
Next spring Littleton hopes to revive FinsterFest, a folk art festival that Finster held every year in the garden to help promote hundreds of unknown artists.
Eventually, Littleton would like to turn one of the houses in the garden into a bed and breakfast.
But in today's economic climate, it's hard to find anyone willing to donate to what many consider a lost cause.
The garden's sculptures are broken and overgrown with vines. Weeds crowd around the folk art church where Finster held hundreds of weddings and other events. And Finster's iconic primitive paintings on the sides of the property's 14 buildings are faded, completely erased in some places.
The messy garden didn't scare Avery away.
The 23-year-old from Gaylesville, Ala., admires Finster's strange artwork and felt a connection to the site, where the preacher-turned-artist officiated at Avery's great-grandmother's wedding in 1965.
"It's kind of like a fairy land," said Avery, dressed in a black velvet cloak and sporting a black mohawk, as she waited recently for her wedding to begin. "It makes me feel like a little kid again. It makes me happy."
She and her groom, Kristopher, said their vows in the yard outside the folk art church and then wandered around the garden, taking newlywed photographs among the decaying buildings and sculptures.
