Janet Balduc’s garden is enough to stop people on the sidewalk in their tracks and to make neighbors slam on the brakes.

“I can find something beautiful in everything that grows,” Balduc said.

Right now, her West Duluth yard is an explosion of tulips.

“When I plant tulips, my mindset is, when you plant tulips, spring will always come,” she said. “And I wait for that first color because you’ve seen gray and mucky mud on the roads and salt and grime and gray days, and you just want that pop of beauty and that scent. And you know summer is here.”

The garden started small. Balduc said her husband wanted a couple cobs of corn, and she wanted some tomatoes and radishes. From there, it grew.

“Don’t be afraid of dirt,” she laughed. “You will be dirty.”

In fact, her 4.5-year-old grandson has always called her Mammy Dirt Dirt. After the tulips will come the peonies, then irises, then lilies. Balduc tells people who wander by to come back every week to see the difference.

“Why can’t I stop? Because it’s an obsession,” she said. “You don’t have to think about it. It just is. That should be the beauty of gardening. You shouldn’t have to overthink it. It should be something you love to do.”