The Betley resident and retired art teacher has spent decades accumulating a body of work that spans oil paintings, acrylic abstracts and striking three-dimensional sculptures — a creative output that once caught the eye of BBC producers, who filmed his garden for the 2013 series Open Gardens on BBC Two.

We begin in the studio, where the most recent finished canvas sits drying on an easel. It started, he explains, as a demonstration piece for a WI ladies' group, painted in acrylics so the layers would dry quickly enough to keep pace with the audience. Back home, he overpainted it in oils. "You get that richer quality," he says. Almost everything here is oil paint in the end. Almost everything except when the acrylics do something the oils can't.

Reeves works from photographs, from memory, and sometimes from pure invention. But one of his abiding preoccupations is abstraction, or what he calls semi-abstraction. A series of resist paintings in a stack of canvases resting against the wall: acrylics sprayed with turpentine, which creates blooming, organic patterns. "They look like flowers in a field themselves," he says. "Wildflowers." He discovered the technique after seeing a fellow artist's work at a gallery in Tunbridge Wells, an exhibition apparently covered in red-dot sales. He came home and started experimenting. It became, he explains, "a marriage of abstract resists and bringing something pictorial into it as well."

Water appears again and again in his work. So does industrial landscape. Born and bred in the Potteries, Reeves carries Stoke's gritty, fired-clay heritage in his painter's eye. Some of his most celebrated canvases depict the ginnels — those narrow, cobbled back passages threading between Victorian terraces — and the bottle kilns of Middleport Potteries. One ginnel painting sold almost immediately. Then another. Then a third. "People like it when they see the bottle kilns," he says. "And like a writer, we can move mountains. So I moved the bottle kilns."

There is real joy in the way he describes adding a kiln to a scene where no kiln stood, the way a novelist might shift a church to the horizon for compositional effect. It speaks to a freedom that has taken decades to fully inhabit. A freedom Turner understood, he suggests, an artist he has long admired, particularly for his atmospheric treatment of light. "To think that's 200 years ago, and we're doing something we consider modern today, which borders very much on what he was doing."

The three-dimensional work demands its own conversation, and we have it as we step outside.

Reeves' garden in Betley is a remarkable thing. Expansive but intimate, it reveals itself in stages and deliberately so. "I didn't want you to see it all in one go," he says. "I want it to reveal itself." His wife eventually told him to stop digging new borders into the lawn. "There's going to be no lawn left," she said. She was not wrong.

What fills the space instead is a landscape that operates on its own sculptural logic. Stone pillars rescued from a builder's yard, an order that was never collected anchor a formal area. Stoneware vessels from his teaching days cluster around a pond. Carved oak beams, salvaged from a school roundabout sculpture he designed with students (later destroyed, outrageously, by travellers seeking firewood), weather beautifully against old walls. "I just love the way it's weathering," he says. "It's just beautiful."

He is unabashed about caring more for structure than for plants. "The plants come second. I'm hopeless at plants." What he is not hopeless at is composition. The garden operates like a painting, with foreground interest, layered depth, and the sound of running water providing the equivalent of ambient light. "Sometimes if the sun's shining and there's a glass of wine, just to hear the gentle trickle of water... We're all different. Whatever turns you on."

The sculptures made for local churches are stored in a loft and brought out for seasons of use. The Last Supper in three panels, each figure fully three-dimensional in masking tape and newspaper, with Jesus in the centre; a crucifixion; a Resurrection figure of Christ rising from a dark blue tomb. "It takes about a good hour to get it down from the loft up to the church," he says. The vicar, Barry, commissioned the Last Supper, and offered a note of historical authenticity: Michelangelo, he pointed out, had the disciples seated on chairs. In reality, they would have squatted on the floor. Reeves duly squatted them.

The garden was part of the National Gardens Scheme for more than 20 years, regularly drawing visitors and raising funds for St Luke's Hospice in Winsford. His late wife Edith was the hospice's first matron. On a good sunny day, they might take £500 on the gate alone, with another £150 or so from teas and cakes inside, all of it going to the charity. Last year, he stepped back from the formal open days. Eighty-two, he says, is perhaps the right age to stop hoping it doesn't rain.

Instead, he is contemplating something looser like opening the garden to neighbours, leaving a bucket at the gate. "The garden to me is just another piece of sculpture that's come out of the summer house, really," he says. That, as a statement of creative philosophy, is hard to argue with.

Before the BBC cameras arrived in 2013, before the exhibitions at the Foxlowe Arts Centre in Leek and the New Vic in Etruria, before decades of moderating for AQA and fighting for arts funding in Cheshire schools against headteachers who thought computers belonged only to Business Studies, before all of that, there was a man who painted on hardboard primed with white emulsion, because hardboard was cheap and the rough side looked like canvas.

He still exhibits, currently negotiating for a show later this year, following his most recent exhibition at the Foxlowe, where around 50 paintings filled the upstairs gallery and one sold to a buyer in Poland. He is also edging toward more abstraction, a creative risk he says he might have taken more boldly ten years ago. But ten years ago, he would also have been ten years younger.

"I think I've finished that," he says, nodding at the latest canvas on the easel. Then he looks at another painting, propped nearby. "But this one…it's somehow just empty. It needs something more in the foreground."

Something tells me he will come back to it.

Mike Reeves' work has been exhibited at the Foxlowe Arts Centre in Leek and the New Vic Theatre in Etruria. He is currently seeking a venue for a new exhibition later this year.