The plants he prizes bear the oversize, fantasy foliage of a Maurice Sendak dreamscape. “I don’t care that much about flowering,” he said. “I’m much more into dead plants and seed pods” — or rattling calyxes that look as if they might contain goblin teeth. If this is a prairie, it is a prairie of the imagination.

A garden, Mr. Golden said, should be a place “to sit in, think about, look at the sky in, live in. In my case, it’s sort of a psychological exploration of the hidden, the part of myself that never got expressed because I was such a timid, shy little boy. I learned to adapt over the years to living in the world. On sunny days, when the garden is in full growth, it’s quite exuberant and in-your-face. It’s pretty much the opposite of my personality.”

In other words, Mr. Golden’s garden is useless, except as an all-encompassing creation that fills his days and reveals his innermost feelings to the world.

And the world, for once, is listening. William Martin, an iconoclastic gardener and lecturer in rural Australia, discovered the Federal Twist blog and now counts himself among an international fan club. “It’s not really about horticulture,” he said of Federal Twist. (“Haughty-culture,” is the way Mr. Martin pronounces it, although this could be an accident of his Scottish and Australian upbringing.)

Though his own dry-climate garden, Wigandia, showcases vastly different plants, Mr. Martin reports that the two often correspond about “gardens as places for the mind instead of places for shovel and spade.”

Mr. Golden claims no formal training in haughty-culture. “I didn’t grow up seeing many pretty gardens,” he said. “The closest I came was the cemetery in Canton, Mississippi. I used to play there.” His favorite spot was the old brick columbarium, built for the casualties of a yellow fever epidemic.

There is a profession designated for children with such a rarefied disposition: poetry. And a place where they migrate when they grow up: New York. Specifically, an M.F.A. program brought Mr. Golden to Columbia University. “Then I ran out of money,” he said. “And I had to get a real job.”