Where Britain's eccentrics bloom - Telegraph "I've always been crazy about trains," he says. When my kids left home, I knocked their bedrooms together and made a museum for all my railway memorabilia. I've got about 20,000 items, but it wasn't enough. I wanted something other collectors didn't have. So I started on the garden. At night, it's all lit up. Looks fantastic. I live by the railway line, and when the drivers go by they hoot and wave. I had a couple of steam engines for while, but they cost too much to maintain. Or retired businessman Derek Leek, 70, from Alveley, Shropshire, who has the 17-foot long cockpit of a Canberra nuclear bomber in his back garden. "Some people might think I am mad," he says, "but I think it is very attractive. I like to give it an affectionate pat as I go past. I also spend a fair bit of time sitting in it and imagining what it would have been like for those who flew in it. The relic cost him £4,000, and apart from the absence of a fuselage is in near-perfect working order. To the likes of pagans John and Suky Burton, trains and planes are altogether too new-fangled. The pair have assembled a prehistoric stone circle in the garden of their house in Dorchester. Such operations are tricky from a ritualistic point of view, and to help the stones settle in, the Burtons aligned them with an ancient ley line and had them consecrated by a coven of witches. "It would be better if we had a bigger garden," admitted Suky, 64, "but having them here makes everything feel very peaceful and spiritual. The land where they were before was going to be sold for redevelopment and they would just have been dug up and thrown away. The two giant females standing in sculptor Mike Nance's garden were intended to be temporary residents. He hoped to create a 14-foot high concrete statute of a mermaid for his local beach in Teignmouth, Devon, and a 23-foot woman called Honour to stand on the cliffs above Torquay - but so far neither project has been approved by local officials. For now, the fibre glass moulds are biding their time on Mr Nance's lawn. "I know the mermaid would be a massive attraction if I could get it to the beach," he explains. Almost everyone round here is behind me, but the council is dragging its feet. I don't mind it being in my garden, but it belongs elsewhere. Too much mythology? Leap into the future, then, with Lee Smith and his back-garden Tardis. Wrestling with the problem what to give his Dr Who-mad six-year-old son Zachary for a birthday present, Mr Smith, 42, built a perfect-replica police box time machine. "It's about ten-foot tall, so we have to keep it outside," he says. Zachary was completely gobsmacked when he saw it, but he's the envy of all his fiends.