When most people move to a new home, they leave their garden. But one of the featured gardens of this year’s Whidbey Island Garden Tour will show tour participants an example of what can be accomplished through the melding of a vision, hard work and plant savvy.

Established in 1996, the tour is an all-volunteer effort that in eight years has helped raise more than $120,000 for groups in the community.

Six gardens are selected that represent a variety of unique qualities, with the board basing its decision for tour gardens to represent a variety of styles, sizes and design concepts.

The Freeland-area garden of John C. Holborn is one of them.

Holborn is a veteran gardener with years of experience caring for other people’s gardens. He currently oversees the grounds of three large estates.

He is also a plant collector, a self-described addict with a vision. He looks for the unusual in trees, shrubs, and plants and seeks out specimens considered rare and that many people only have a chance to see in books.

“The more unusual it is, all the more reason I want it,” he said.

He has moved his garden three times in the past three years. Each time he moved about 500 plants — from small flowers, shrubs to big trees. It’s all mature, but with each move it becomes a new life.

“By June it will be hard to imagine it’s new because it’s big,” he said.

The first move of Holborn’s garden occurred in 1994 after the 75-acre piece of property near Double Bluff, where the garden had been for nine years, was sold.

The garden next moved to ten acres in Freeland where the old school house of the Freelanders stands. In exchange for use of the land, Holborn spent 14 months restoring the land to what it might have looked like when Freeland’s Utopian founders homesteaded on the site.

In October Holborn began moving his garden for a third, and hopefully, final time to a location nearby in Freeland.

“This is different this time — this is my soil,” he said.

Included in the collection are plants from Virginia and other parts of the country and world that are often believed to have a rare chance In the Pacific Northwest. But not when in the hands of Holborn.

“If in Seattle, most of these plants wouldn’t be able to handle the climate, Around the edge of the property, he has planted a wide array of trees with a close-knit design in mind.

“I picked trees that will be beautiful 12 months of the year, and that will be more beautiful next to each other and blending into each other,” he said. “When the branches mingle together they’ll be spectacular.”

How long will it be before he has to move his garden again? Holborn hopes not in this lifetime.

“I’ve reserved a plot over there,” he said, pointing to a spot on the ground.