GUILDERLAND — When Kathy Gordon moved into her Guilderland home 50 years ago, the yard was barren.

“There was nothing here but sand and weeds,” she said.

She and her husband planted a lawn, which he diligently mowed, but she is the one who filled the yard — and the house — with treasures.

Gordon is an artist and her lush landscape is rather like a mural — its colors chosen with care from a diverse palette.

A lampost at the foot of the driveway is anchored in a circle of hydrangeas, bursting with blue blooms. Behind that, the eye is drawn past pink hibiscus to a rustic split-rail fence with a Rose of Sharon bush beckoning visitors to the front door of her home.

The path to the door is lined with low and leafy greenery, as a bench plump with pillows offers a warm invitation to sit on the front porch.

The backyard, interspersed with trees, rolls away from the house to a green wall of a hedge.

“I love trees,” said Gordon. “If I were in Greek times, I would think each tree had a nymph in it.”

She went on about her high regard for trees, “They protect you in the winter. They cool you in the summer.” Her front yard has a towering silver maple with a rustic settee beneath it.

Trees also provide a haven for wildlife, Gordon notes. In her suburban backyard, she says, “I have a fox, a raccoon, a skunk, and a possum.” The possum is useful, she says, because it eats ticks.

Off to one side of the backyard is a tiny cabin with a front porch all its own. “I found it out on Route 30,” Gordon said. “It was built by the Amish.”

A pergola attached to the house has open rafters, made of redwood, and lends an Asian air to the place. Likewise, a grand entrance to the back door has a peaked roof, supported by exposed timbers in the shape of an unfolded fan.

Everywhere are vignettes arranged like still-life paintings.

One such scene is between the two forest-green garage doors. A worn tall stool is topped with a terracotta pot holding an impatiens plant with blazing pink blossoms. Two rustic barrels are artfully arranged at its base along with a stone jug — and a statue of a lamb at rest.

“I intend to stay here,” said Gordon, who is 90.

Favorite room

She sits most often in her favorite room, which she calls the fireplace room. There is, of course, a fireplace on a brick wall of the room. That wall and others throughout the house are hung with artwork Gordon made herself or, more often, was made by friends.

Last Friday, a fresh bouquet of zinnias in fire-bright colors, perched on a stool next to a rocker, picking up the orange of pumpkins in a friend’s painting hung on the brick wall behind it.

On another wall is a carved fox, with ram’s horns for feet, which Gordon’s grandparents got in Europe.

On that same wall is a cross-stitched sampler, made of tiny Xs in red thread, portraying cats in various poses near birdhouses, with the letters of the alphabet cleverly rendered in between the scenes. It was made by Sandy Angett, a friend of Gordon.

Gordon has two live cats — both black, and both named Kitty. One lolls on a couch in the fireplace room while the other suns itself on pillows in front of the bay window, looking out at the backyard.

Gordon has a third cat — sort of. Two years ago, a feral cat that she calls Muffin started coming around so she set up a house for it in her garage with a blanket that warms up when Muffin lies on it.

Gordon has recently discovered that her next-door neighbors have also looked after the stray cat. “They call him Dexter because he hides under their deck,” Gordon said with a chuckle.

Over her life, she has had a series of shih tzus, each named Buster. Her last one died in her arms six months ago, she said.

Another artwork that literally lights up the fireplace room is a pottery lamp made by Susan Nowogrodzki. “She’s Polish. Her grandmother was lost in the Holocaust,” said Gordon. The lamp is in variegated shades of green and blue and shows a frog taking a deep dive to its base, where little pollywogs swim.

“Her daughter made the lampshade,” said Gordon. The shade has brilliant red flowers bursting into bloom.

Another favorite piece of art hangs by the door — a free-flowing watercolor of snow-covered pine trees with a wintry-orange sky. It was painted by another artist friend — Marj Windstone. She’ll turn 83 next week and is one of a bevy of friends who look in on Gordon daily.

The floor of the fireplace room is covered in a bold carpet — a plaid of red and green, which reflects both Gordon’s Scottish heritage and her love of Christmas. “We found this rug and love it,” she said. “It made the room.”

Making magic

Throughout the house are touches of red and green because Christmas is Gordon’s favorite holiday.

She grew up in Gloversville, the daughter of John McNab Burton, a banker, and Marian Sturges Burton, who had written for the New York Times Magazine.

Her mother had graduated from Wellesley College in the Class of 1917. She was taught English and American literature by Katharine Lee Bates who wrote the words to “America the Beautiful,” and she was a classmate of Soong May-ling, who became Madame Chiang Kai-shek, First Lady of the Republic of China.

“She was plump with a Southern accent because of where she’d been schooled,” said Gordon of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. “We used to get presents from her.”

Gordon said, “My mother grew up on a farm in Connecticut. For Christmas, she just got an orange. She made up for it with us.”

Gordon remembered Christmas Eve in her childhood as “magical.”  She said, “My father went out shopping Christmas Eve and bought everything half-price … I can still taste the candy canes.”

And so Gordon made Christmas special for her two sons, too. The family’s Christmas tree would be placed in the fireplace room.

One of her sons, Christopher, has died. Her surviving son, Jeffrey, lives in Esperance and often helps around the house, Gordon said.

“He likes me to text him every morning and every evening,” she said, demonstrating on her smartphone. She writes now on an iPad and also keeps up with news, closely watching political developments, on a large-screen television in the fireplace room.

Family tree

The seed for starting her family was planted at Cornell University. Gordon had planned to go to Wellesley, like her mother, but fell in love with the beauty of the Cornell campus when she visited at Easter.

She met the man who would become her husband at Willard Straight Hall, a grand bluestone Gothic revival building. “I lost my wallet, and he found it. He didn’t have any money so we split a nickel Coke. I was 17; he was 27.”

While she was a first-year undergraduate, he was a “special student,” just back from his service as a navigator in the Pacific Theater during World War II. “He had already been to UCLA before the war,” she said.

After the couple married, they moved to Ohio State University in Columbus. “I got pregnant — two boys in a row. I kept picking up credits wherever we went.”

They next went to San Diego State in California and then the University of Maryland. When the Gordons lived in Washington, D.C., she said, “You’d see famous people all over the place.” Gordon remembered being at a sale where she spotted a redwood candlestick — there was only one left — and reached for it.

“Mrs. Dean Rusk put her hand out at the same time and wanted it, too,” Gordon recalled. “She let me have it.”

Another time, Gordon took her two boys to the Ecuadorian Embassy to see John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He wasn’t there but someone kindly led her to where he was. She followed in her Volkswagen Beetle.

“Kennedy rolled up with his mother and sisters. He was very tall, very tan, very wrinkled. The wrinkles surprised me. He had gorgeous auburn hair with golden glints. He sort of glowed,” Gordon said, smiling at the memory.

It wasn’t until the Gordon family moved to Guilderland, where her husband taught psychology at the University of Albany, that she finished her college education. She majored in art history and anthropology, earning her bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany.

Her husband died in 2003 and Gordon has managed well in the home she loves. Asked what attracted her to the house in the first place, Gordon said, “It was cheap — $31,750.” She watched it being built.

Once it was finished, she and her husband carried in their furniture themselves — there wasn’t much, she said.

Now, treasures abound. Every room has books. “I’m a book person,” said Gordon. “I like to read history and biographies.” She’s looking forward to the annual book sale at the Guilderland library where, she said, the prices are “ridiculously low.”

Next to a bookcase in the living room is a desk built by Gordon’s great-great-great grandfather, Judah Burton, a soldier in the Revolutionary War. “During the War of 1812, they took the metal off of it to make bullets,” she said. “It’s been across the country twice.”

On top of the desk is a tea set made by her friend, Nowogrodzki. And beside it is a tile-topped table, also made by Nowogrodzki. Painted on the tiles, as a wide border, horses stand in noble poses.  “I always wanted horses and never got one, so she made it for me,” said Gordon.

In the same room, with books resting on it, is a finely inlaid piece of furniture, dating from the 1700s, that once was a spinet piano and now serves as a desk. “That was my great-great-great-grandmother’s. Aaron Burr was a cousin; he played on it,” Gordon said.

Over the antique spinet is a print that Gordon and her husband got at the Louvre — a prehistoric drawing of horses from the Lascaux cave.

A nest

Entering her 10th decade, Gordon is fortified by the treasures she has collected in her home of a half-century.

“It’s my home,” she said. “I know people go to nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. But I want to stay here. I know every speck of this house. I think I have enough funds to stay here.”

Her graduating class at Gloversville High School had more than 100 students, she said. “Our class now has just two viable people.”

“It’s hard,” Gordon went on. “I just quit driving … I was worried I might hit someone.”

“Kathy has a lot of friends because she’s been a good friend,” said Windstone. “We’re here every day.”

And Gordon is still busy with her work. “I have a whole slew of pictures I’ve been doing lately,” she said. Her son is going to help her make them into cards.

Asked what art she liked best of all her work, Gordon answered without hesitation. “It’s a simple one,” she said. The small, framed painting hangs on the cherry-patterned wallpaper of her laundry room.

It is a delicate depiction of a nest.