He was as proud as a new father, giving me a tour of the grounds. “You try to match the plantings to the architecture and the colors. I mean, what do I know about that? But, like, if you had a modern, industrial building, you would have lots of evergreen and sturdy red geraniums. This structure is modern, but it’s also got the feeling of the old Byzantine church, so you can have more elaborate flowers that are still delicate.”

Clematis arched over raised beds filled with fuchsia, catmint, campanula, delphiniums, foxgloves, hardy geranium, herbs and lavender. My son had recently found a pair of old stone birdbaths with hooplike trellises over their tops and he persuaded two of the men to bring them to the garden in one of their trucks. Then he wound these with pussy willow stems and filled the bath hollows with cliff roses and crocuses, both native plants in Greece.

“Listen to these names: Russian sage, ice cap, lady orchid peony,” he said to me. “The names are like perfume.” He pointed out how the lavender and rosemary scented the air around the gardens, and explained the sequences in which the plants would flower. The raised beds were edged in artemisia and green boxwood, and through them were veins of gold and purple stone. “The shrubs and the little trees add structure, like the frame on a painting,” he told me.

“How did you learn to do all this?” I asked him.

“I looked it up on the internet. Then I started streaming gardening shows at night on my computer. I figured out how to hit garage sales and where the cheapest places were to buy stuff and get the church a big discount. I find a lot of it from people’s trash, too, frankly.”

He said he was now maybe thinking about studying landscape architecture the following year. “It’s the perfect blend for me. You get to think and move your body around. You don’t get as much of a chance to be depressed because you have to go outside all the time. And you can start your own small company and bid on jobs. People’s houses. Small businesses. You can get a riding mower. People don’t care who the guy is who shows up to do the landscaping. They don’t say, hey, have you got a record? Then maybe someday, I can get contracts for whole subdivisions and parks. There’s this woman online who only designs garden seating. She only designs park benches. And she’s famous.” Once the gardens were completed, he said, he would maintain them as he did the interior of the church.