Even though it’s St. Patrick’s Day, this column has nothing to do with leprechauns, green beer, or finding a pot of gold. Sorry to disappoint. Instead, we’re talking about spring, shovels, and a very different kind of treasure: the slightly battered yards of the Catskills, and George Harrison.

Now that the weather is hinting spring, many of us step outside, look around the property, and begin noticing what the winter left behind. A fence leaning a little too far. A garden bed that vanished under last year’s weeds. A stone wall that mysteriously seems to have collapsed overnight, though it probably took all winter to do it.

Spring has a way of pointing out everything that needs restoration.

The funny thing is that most of us don’t see that as discouraging. Quite the opposite. There is something hopeful about walking around the yard with a cup of coffee, mentally making a list of what might be revived. A little pruning here. Clearing there. Maybe planting something new.

That small seasonal ritual reminded me of someone who took the idea of restoration to an entirely different level.

In 1970, George Harrison stood at the gates of an estate in England called Friar Park. What he saw looked less like a home and more like a catastrophe.

The Victorian mansion was rotting. Grass pushed through the floorboards inside. The gardens, once famous throughout England, had gone feral. Greenhouses had collapsed. Grottoes were buried. Pathways were strangled by decades of neglect.

Most people would have run the other way.

George Harrison was 27 years old. The Beatles had just broken up. The world was waiting for whatever he chose to do next. He bought the wreck. And then he started digging. Not as a weekend hobby. As a life.

Friar Park turned out to be one of the most eccentric gardens ever built. It had caves and underground tunnels. There was a four-acre Alpine rock garden with a miniature Matterhorn. Garden gnomes appeared everywhere. When Harrison released All Things Must Pass, he posed among those gnomes for the cover photos and then went right back to gardening.

He hired ten gardeners and worked alongside them from dawn until midnight, often covered in soil.

His son Dhani later recalled watching his father wander the gardens late at night, working by moonlight. Harrison once joked that he preferred gardening in the dark because he could not see the imperfections that would bother him during the day.

Meanwhile the music industry kept calling. Record companies wanted albums. Promoters wanted tours. The world still wanted George Harrison the Beatle.

He wanted to plant trees.

If a nursery owner mentioned that business was slow, Harrison sometimes bought one of everything in the shop. When someone offered him 800 varieties of maple trees, he bought the entire collection. But he did not think of the garden as something he owned. His wife Olivia later remembered him saying, “It’s not my garden.” He saw himself as a custodian. The garden did not belong to him. He belonged to it.

By 1980, Harrison published his autobiography and dedicated it “to gardeners everywhere.” In interviews he often said he preferred planting flowers and watching them grow.

Harrison died in 2001. By then the once-ruined estate had become one of the finest examples of Victorian landscape restoration in England. Olivia still tends the gardens today.

So, this spring, when we step outside and look at our slightly battered Catskills yards, it may help to remember George Harrison standing in front of a property that most people thought was hopeless. He chose dirt under his fingernails instead of applause. And in that choice, he found something the stadiums never gave him. Freedom.

Now if you will excuse me, I think I have a stone wall that needs a little attention.