GAMBIER, Ohio — In the middle of Ohio, nestled between farmland and factories, sits a 75-acre garden that is a sight to behold.
“This is a 300-foot deep well, it runs 24 hours a day, 37 gallons a minute and it just keeps everything full and fresh all the time,” said Ted Schnormeier, who owns Schnormeier Gardens in Gambier.
“Tens and thousands of tons we brought in from every place because this place was all bare land you have to understand,” he said referencing the giant boulders and rocks that were trucked in from quarries around Ohio in the past 30 years.
Schnormeier took 10TV’s Angela An on a private tour of the nine distinct gardens he and his late wife Ann created nearly 30 years ago. The couple had traveled to Japan in the mid-1990s and were quickly swept up by the serenity and harmony of Asian culture and landscape.
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Now visitors to Schnormeier Gardens can experience that same peaceful feeling for themselves when they come out to the annual open house during the month of June. There’s a Japanese tea house, a Chinese arch bridge, terra cotta soldiers from Xian, China and other artifacts from Asia.
“I think it has opened their minds significantly and expanded it because they have no idea of Asian culture and the garden culture,” Schnormeier said. He also says the gardens were a true labor of love he and Ann worked on together so people in central Ohio could experience cultures from halfway around the world.
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“We thought we had created something that we shouldn’t keep to ourselves,” Schnormeier said. “It would be too selfish and we wanted to share with others.”