Victor Allen Crawford stands behind the bog garden he has built in his backyard in Mt. Holly, N.J.

MCT / Ron Tarver

PHILADELPHIA

It’s very warm today, well into 80-degree territory. Nonetheless, Victor Allen Crawford 3d is dressed in a pressed linen suit and tie, long-sleeved shirt with French cuffs (and links), polka-dotted pocket square, the whole enchilada.

Standing in his tiny Mount Holly, N.J., kitchen, he offers a visitor a wine glass of sparkling Pellegrino water and a small bowl of strawberries. “Please,” he implores, placing a faux silver tray on the table, “have some.”

We’re here to tour his backyard bog garden, a mini-wetland (sandy, peaty, mossy) inside a koi-pond mold that produces a kind of micro-Pine Barrens. That’s where Crawford lived before high home prices sent him packing for Mount Holly, and that’s where his heart lies.

The Pinelands’ wild and weird flora fascinate this genteel gentleman. Not so the common marigold or “pale, pale roses” in many home gardens. “Boring, boring, boring,” he complains. Give him voodoo lilies with roadkill stink, angel’s trumpets with rouged-up mouths, and Venus flytraps with malicious intent!

The man is intense. Hates etiquette, loves manners. Hates rainbow perennial beds, loves bogs, which, in the gardening world, are considered pretty nerdy. Too scientific, and oddball, for most.

Yet that’s the draw for Crawford. Bogs are sensitive and nutrient-poor, with evocative cedar-topped mounds and silent brown water. Attractive, repulsive — exactly!

Crawford’s nascent bog garden, 9 feet long, 5 feet wide and a foot deep, seems a perfect fit for a guy who calls himself Lord Whimsy.

In his 2006 book, The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Volume One (Bloomsbury Publishing, $14.95), Crawford — a native of eastern Kentucky who did most of his growing up in Somers Point, N.J. — invented the persona of Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy, a dandy who lives to entertain and “reawaken the poetry of the human soul.”

It’s a strange little book, billed as “a bounteous selection of essays, philosophical diagrams, poetry, and other Arcadian follies concerning the art of curious living and the reintroduction of ancient charm into this vale of mud and tears known heretofore as the modern life.”

No joke. Shortly after the book’s publication, Johnny Depp bought the movie rights. Crawford pinched himself, then splurged on the linen suit he’s wearing today.

So he’s in character, assuming a mask fashioned around the contours of his own personality.

“It allows me to be myself, only more so,” says Crawford, who isn’t always dolled up like a middle-aged Fauntleroy.

“I wear jeans all the time,” he insists.

Crawford or Whimsy, Whimsy or Crawford, he’s a sophisticated naturalist and gardener who’s enamored of orchids and flytraps, pitcher plants and terrariums, and who, in or out of the garden, is drawn to the outrageous.

Despite the heat and his attire, he accepts a challenge to take his “boneshaker” for a spin. It’s a replica of a 19th-century velocipede, the first true bicycle with pedals, and — ho-hum — the neighbors have seen this show before.

As he lumbers down Emma Street atop his “moving sculpture,” his “engine of happiness,” he shouts, “I’m like Willy Wonka. The kids love it!” But no one’s around today.

No matter. Whimsy’s in the moment.

In other moments, in the book, he rails against baggy pants, poor posture, and “the perils of sportswear,” for its propensity to lower the common sartorial denominator. He lauds crisp silhouettes, exquisite manners, and “an ability to coax enchantment from even the most prosaic of settings.”

He’s deadly serious, and, by God, he’s funny.

“Obviously, I’m pulling people’s legs,” Crawford, 40, explains, without smiling.

But listen up, and then decide. Is your leg — or your consciousness — being stretched?

Crawford likes unconventional plants because, like bogs, they’re beautiful and interesting.

“Ugly can sometimes be beautiful, but merely pretty can never be beautiful,” he says. “Things that are really beautiful keep you coming back because they’re not just attractive, they’re compelling.”

Crawford’s baby bog is host to creamy-flowered cranberry, snakemouth orchids, and carnivorous pitcher plants.

They’re arranged in relaxed fashion with a mantle of moss, pine-needle mulch, and a decorative border of daffodils, sweet potato vine, and hens and chicks.

“I’m not a big fan of overly manicured gardens. They’re like office parks,” Crawford says. “I like to let things go a little bit wild.”

Not a bad motto to live by, eh, Whimsy?

“Life does not have to be one expediency after another, one dreary, endless expanse of crap you have to do,” Crawford says. “We can give ourselves permission to ask more of life, to make it more lush and colorful.”

For Crawford, this means “dispersing my artistic energies through all aspects of my life, in the way I dress, eat and live. And it’s not all about money.”

It was this world view that caused New York literary agent Peter Steinberg to fall “head over heels” for The Affected Provincial’s Companion after only two hours of reading. A few days later, at the London Book Fair, it took mere minutes to sell the book to Bloomsbury Publishing.

It was Steinberg’s fastest deal in 12 years as an agent.

“Whimsy draws you in with humor,” he says. “Then you start reading it and start thinking about the way he looks at the world, his unique perspective on things.”

In this age of overdo, Crawford confides, he and his wife, Susan, graphic designers and illustrators who met in biology class at Stockton State College, live in a modest Cape Cod, existing happily — though pretty much hand-to-mouth. One of their most memorable jobs, in 2003, was to produce 400 illustrations of marine life — sea slugs to whales — for the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Irony of ironies, what if Whimsy turns out to be the Crawfords’ ... excuse the vulgarity ... meal ticket? Could happen. As the dandy himself is wont to say, “Intelligence and talent can get you far, but charm and wit can get you everywhere.”

Lord Whimsy’s Web site is http://www.lordwhimsy.com/.GARDENS OF WHIMSY

Victor Allen Crawford 3d often describes plants in his garden as “a curiosity piece” or “a conversation piece.”

“I have no time for marigolds,” he sniffs.

No, it’s carnivorous plants and other exciting stuff for Crawford’s bog garden, a type little known or understood by most gardeners.

In The Affected Provincial’s Companion, in a chapter subtitled “Why Heaven Is a Bog,” Crawford, as Lord Whimsy, writes: “I often wonder how it would be to shrink to a very small size, put on a pair of snowshoes, and explore every little nook in this alien landscape, never to return to the world of the loud, large and fast, but dwell forever amidst the silent, small and low.”

Nothing says bog garden like silent, small and low.

Like Crawford, Joe Kiefer has created a small bog garden — at Triple Oaks Nursery in Franklinville, Pa., which he co-owns with his mother. And he, too, goes for different and dramatic.

“I don’t want to grow a bog garden with lots of grass,” Kiefer says. “I want a pitcher plant eating bugs. I want a Venus flytrap that closes its trap like a horror movie. I want bold, exciting stuff!”

Kiefer’s bog garden is planted in full sun, ringed with New Jersey sandstone, lined with a pond liner, and filled with local sand and peat moss. He plants when the weather turns hot, waters once a week, and doesn’t use mulch.

His favorite bog plants are pitcher plant, eupatorium and cardinal flower. He likes native dwarf palmetto, dogbane, orchid, sundew and blueberry, too. The design is free-form.

“This is a natural kind of garden, not a formal garden,” Kiefer says. “No sheared boxwood.”

Understand that bog plants can be expensive and hard to find, and getting the correct ambience in these unusual gardens can be tricky. You want it dry at the top and moist, but not wet, at the bottom.

“People think, ‘Oh, that’s too much trouble,’ ” Kiefer says, “but you have to water annuals more than pitcher plants. These plants have adapted to drought and less-than-perfect conditions.”

And if you get it right, the rewards are great.

The dainty pitchers in Kiefer’s bog have cupped leaves of chartreuse, creamy white or rusty red with thin, rosy veins, speckles or stripes. Their tilted tops look like inquisitive cobras or — if you’re a flying, crawling insect — delicious. But they’re death traps.

Creatures are drawn to the cavity by color or nectar, and once in, it’s curtains. They drown.

“Pretty neat,” says Kiefer. Grinning, naturally.