For years, I've made excuses to walk past a house up the street from mine in Burlington's New North End. It isn't one you'd notice right away. The yard is hard to see from a car, hidden by low trees and shade plants and tall perennial flowers guarding the road verge.

But for sidewalk amblers, the discovery is part of the fun.

Depending on the time of year, the yard hosts any number of tiny ceramic, stone and plastic creatures: pastel rabbits, eggs and chicks; weathered turtles and gnomes; or a teddy bear picnic for 30. Real goldfish swim in a small, portable pond. Fist-size cement snails festoon the soil. During the austere months of winter, life-size clay crows, painted black from talon to iris, perch in the snow. Their placement feels sober or comical, depending on my mood.

"The snails are sort of the stars this year," the garden's steward, Nancy Fitch, said. "Everybody gets a turn."

But the fairies rule the day. Small and delicate, the ceramic painted ladies pour themselves tea and whisper to ladybugs. They lounge in birds' nests, their whorls of wavy hair caught mid-gust, or hide under geraniums and confer with the frogs, legs tangled up in vines. They stay out the longest, Fitch said, "because people like them probably the best."

"I have a soft spot for fairies," she added. "I really do, and I don't know why."

If you are very lucky, you might catch Fitch in the yard. At 81, she is slender and spry, with close-cropped white hair and a matter-of-fact demeanor. She pulls a weed or a dead leaf or chats with a neighbor. And then she is gone.

But her presence in the garden remains, as its dreamer, its editor, its keeper. After all, she's been at this for 40 years.

To find out how Fitch's fairy garden began, I met up with her during a mid-August break in the rain. I learned that her yard began to veer away from convention in the mid-1980s, when her younger son needed a science project. Fitch had just read an article in Woman's Day magazine called "Making a Home for Birds," about how to certify your backyard as a wildlife habitat. She asked her son if getting their Burlington backyard certified might fit the bill.

Her son took the idea and ran with it. The middle schooler contacted the National Wildlife Federation, the Audubon Society, the University of Vermont Extension, and the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department. He dug a pond in their backyard. He made a drip bucket so that birds could bathe and shower. His thick report, meticulously researched and written in careful cursive, received an A+.

As the years passed, though, it was Fitch who kept the flowers watered and the birds fed. She traded with friends and neighbors for plants and garden materials, many of which are still in the yard today. In the backyard, under the oaks and pines and an arbor of weeping larch, the bird feeders and ponds multiplied.

Walking barefoot through the grass, Fitch pointed out orange double lilies given to her by her late mother-in-law, who lived to be 98; driftwood and stones from friends; and 30-year-old blue hydrangeas just past bloom.

These aren't thick stands of prize blooms. Each flower is healthy and beautiful, but it shares its space with shade plants and fallen trees.

Fitch recalled the words of a flower-watching friend who recently died. "She said, 'Nancy, you really like little, ugly things much better than flowers,'" she said. "And I think she might have had a point. I like the mushrooms and the little things and stuff that comes in on the wind."

Over the years, Fitch added figurines to her yard here and there. A ceramic frog, smiling from under a hosta. A toy lizard, sunning itself on a rock. A silent toad in the sedum. They move around, but their place is always carefully chosen, never overwhelming the natural scene around them. Instead, they draw your eye to focal points in the lovingly cared-for woodland garden.

The woods were the original inspiration for Fitch's love of nature when she was growing up in upstate New York.

"When I was really little, my mother would take me into the woods and we would look for a wildflowers," she said. "That was always my favorite thing."

Fitch saves photos and notes that she receives from passersby who admire her garden. One card is from a parent who planned a "whimsical garden party" for "children aged 4-11" and hoped to stop by. A letter expresses simple gratitude for the garden's existence, year after year. Others have shown their thanks by donating figurines to the collection.

Fitch showed me her first gift, a graying ceramic turtle with red stains beginning to bloom around the edges of its shell, from a young man and his 3-year-old daughter. "They said, 'We think this turtle would like to live here, but then it likes to live with us,'" she recalled. "And it's still out there. He lives here every summer."

Fitch said she is very happy that people enjoy the yard and bring their children. She meets a lot of people that way. But she insists there is no grand mystery behind its existence.

"It doesn't have a great deep meaning for me, except that I enjoy it," she said.

But anyone paying attention will find meaning in Fitch's commitment to care and detail, season after season. More than just a fairy garden, the New North End oasis is a memory garden, a record of its maker's life: wildflower hunting with a beloved mother, gardening with her sons, gifts from loved ones who have passed on. It's a living demonstration of what it means to spend 60 years in one place and tend to that place like a family member, bringing joy to oneself and the community alike.

"It's just my lifetime of interest," Fitch said. "I just like to do this."

Fitch asked that Seven Days not reveal the exact location of her fairy garden to avoid crowds. But she welcomes visitors who happen upon it naturally. So if you find the place, count yourself lucky. And feel free to linger on the sidewalk as long as you like.