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Art is enjoying a coming out party across America as gardeners add personality to their yards.

   Discarded farm implements are being restored for use as planters. Plywood cutouts of Disney-like ducklings are staked out alongside driveways and sidewalks. Statuary mingles with rose bushes. Fountains become the focal points of residential ponds. Colorful bottles replace fall foliage on tree branches.

   Personal statements, all. But does this visual outpouring represent a creative direction in landscaping or is it just so much neighborhood kitsch?

   ''Garden is art and art is a part of the garden. We realize these two things belong together,'' said Holly Shimizu, executive director of the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C.

   Shimizu's husband is a Japanese garden designer, which is an exacting form of landscaping.

   ''You do have some restraints in that kind of garden,'' Shimizu said. ''I kept wanting to junk ours up. He kept saying, 'No.' I finally found a beautiful stone Buddha. He said, 'OK.' It looks nice and appropriate.

   "Some gardens are meant for yard art and there are certain kinds of yards where it really works. But it's not for every garden. You have to have a respect for place.''

   Jill Nokes is a horticulturist and landscape designer from Austin, Texas, who became fascinated with yard art or ''vernacular landscapes'' during family travels across the region as a child.

   It's a way for people to ''use their yard or garden to create particularly exuberant statements about themselves, their history or background and even religious beliefs,'' writes Nokes in Yard Art and Handmade Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home (University of Texas Press).