Teresa Prisbrey and her Bottle Village in California, destroyed by the 1994 earthquake

Remember the grannies and grandpas who build marvellous gardens in their yards and front gardens, with ladybirds, swans made of tyres, towers of plastic bottle tops, toys, figurines, waterfalls and other magic? People usually pass such creations by with, at best, an indulgent smile and a moment's attention. In California, however, an open-air museum of this kind has been recognised as a local treasure.

Tressa Prisbrey (1896–1988) built around her trailer an entire village of bottles and other things that can be found on a rubbish tip. The place became a sight worth seeing in the old lady's own lifetime, for she never stopped raising new little bottle cottages on her land.

I wondered why she should suddenly have embarked on so unexpected an undertaking. Behind the decision, of course, lay a particular personal drama and circumstances she longed to overturn, and the building of her own fairy-tale kingdom became an escape from poverty, routine and the setbacks of life into a place where only the joy of labour mattered and everything depended on herself and her dream.

Today's people flee dreary reality into the internet; Granny Prisbrey fled into a world of her own making, of bright glass and sunshine.

Tressa Luella Schaefer married very early, at 15, her husband being a 52-year-old man, the former husband of her sister. She spent 14 years married to him and, in effect, saw nothing but the torments of motherhood and the drudgery of running a rural household. In those years she bore seven children. After her husband's death she moved away and married again; after a short marriage came another move and another marriage.

If one thinks about it, this woman was not left alone for decades, saw no glimmer of light and had no idea who she was, if not a mother and a wife.

By the age of 60, by now Mrs Prisbrey, Tressa had acquired a small plot of land not far from the Pacific coast and at last settled down. By then she had a rather unusual collection, of several tens of thousands of pencils and pens, and there was nowhere to keep these modest paraphernalia: a caravan simply has no such room. One way out remained, to build a house, but all the money she had managed to save over the long years had gone on buying the plot, and nothing was left for building materials. Tressa then reasoned that everything she needed she could find for nothing, and so it proved: at a tip nearby she gathered hundreds of glass bottles, which were perfectly suited to building a small shed for her private collection. She mixed the mortar herself, gathered the bottles herself, and the result was quite decent. Above all, she had acquired a new hobby and a new interest in life. By then Tressa had lost six of her children; she was left with only a daughter and an elder sister, and now also a village of her own, in which there were new summerhouses, round halls, paths, towers and passages to be raised…

Granny Prisbrey built her village for almost twenty years, as long as her strength allowed, leading tours and singing songs. Quite elderly by then, past 84, she could no longer add to her creation and moved in with her daughter. Tressa died in 1988. The Bottle Village, as a local landmark, passed into the ownership of a special committee charged with preserving it. The location was filmed for television programmes, newspapers and magazines, and crowds of tourists came, until in 1994 the village was wrecked by an earthquake. So, by the centenary of Granny Prisbrey's birth, the work of her life lay in ruins.

It is amusing that something made literally out of rubbish, which became a whole world for one person and drew the attention of thousands of people from all over the globe, demanded vast sums for its restoration once it fell apart. The federal budget allocated half a million dollars to restore the Bottle Village, though the money was later withdrawn. All the same, local authorities and committees raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in total for the restoration of Granny Prisbrey's legacy, although the work went very slowly and unproductively. As a result, one can still visit the village today, but it is of course no longer what it was. Prisbrey herself compared herself to Walt Disney, adding that it had cost him millions to create his fairy tale, whereas hers had cost something greater and, in essence, nothing.