Just ask Jerry Sorbel to venture out on his lawn, and he'll start up right away.

He'll point to a potted plant, a cluster of vine, a burst of flowers, and tell its story, like he's boasting about the grandkids.

There's the trumpet vine that stops everyone as they're strolling by, intrigued by the mass of green and the tubular blooms. And the hydrangeas whose color he changed by pouring some aluminum sulfate. And the hanging pots of petunias that he promises in a few weeks will be overgrown like the head of a mop.

His daughter Debbie insists there are several hundred kinds of blossoms he tends to in his garden each day.

But the 80-year-old doesn't have a full tally, anymore.

"I don't ever count 'em," the Coeur d'Alene man said. "But I've got a lot."

He has it down to a science. The handful of Osmocote he slips in to preserve the flowers' lifespans, a practiced watering pattern so he doesn't miss a bud.

"What else can I do?" Jerry said with a chuckle. "Watch TV? Get fat?"

His gardening, like his life, is steady.

Sorbel's vast flower garden brightens the Coeur d'Alene home he has lived in since 1955, back when it was the only home on the block, and before the road was paved.

In the passing decades, he worked for but one company, Northwest Timber, gradually climbing his way up to plant manager. After a long day of work, he would return to build onto his home by hand, adding on a 20-foot bedroom, a porch, a shop by the garage.

"I didn't have any money then," he explained with a laugh. "I could do it for a third of the cost, if I did all the work."

And he would garden.

It started out modest, a few blooms around the house where the sprinklers would hit. But like his mother, who gardened up through her last summer at 92, Jerry found handling the soil a source of peace.

"They're just like kids," he said as he brushed his palm over a cluster of petunias. "You've got to take care of them."

The years and life rolled on around him as he measured his time between work, tweaks to the house and private moments in the garden.

Hardships and victories occurred. His divorce from his first wife in the '80s, the marriage to his second, Patricia, in 1986. Raising three children, and losing a son, Greg, in 2003 from a drug overdose.

He was transferred to run a mill in Bend, Ore., in the '90s, where Jerry stayed only a few years before retiring and returning home with Patricia. They road tripped until age interfered.

"I had a lot of time on my hands," Jerry said.

He turned to the garden.

It only expanded about a decade ago to the countless plants there are today, with flowers lining his rectangular backyard, hanging from the roof, clustered in beds out front.

In his shop, he cobbled a slew of wood bird houses, decorations and bird feeder hangers that dot the yard like a little town.

Increasingly his projects have become an escape as Patricia's Alzheimer's spiraled, bringing in a foreign stress from her random fits.

There is shouting and tears, and working among the blooms is a welcome constant in the midst of her swiftly changing moods.

"When she gets in a fit, I come out here, take some dead flowers out," Jerry said, staring at a huddle of zinnias. "There's always something to do."

He hasn't asked for more than what he's gotten in life, and quietly endured the disappointments in the hours working with his hands. Clean, hard work to put it all into perspective.

"He has instilled upon me hard work and honesty," said his daughter Debbie, visiting her father from Hayden on Tuesday. "He's done so much work. Just all the effort, and being determined to do it himself."

Jerry takes time every day to admire it all, he said.

He'll grab a beer and soak in the sun with his westie Magie, taking it all in.

"I sit there and look," he said. "And if I see, 'Oh, there's a weed,' I grab it."

So his home isn't a mansion. Maybe the garden sees a weed now and then. But for all of it, like his life, he takes responsibility, and feels pride of ownership.

His home.

"It's me," he said.