Recently a little more information was requested about our small "garden" outside the back door.
Well, there's really not that much to it so this shouldn't take long.
In fact, calling it a garden might be stretching the definition a little.
I suppose, with a little imagination, you could clasify it as an English Garden. Largely natural and arguably unkempt compared to the Edwardian and Victorian garden stylings that underly most of American ornamental gardens and lawns. But we aren't of the 'dam Mother nature and natural processes, I can do it better' mindset.
In fact we never really planned this 'garden' at all. It just sort of happened.
It started with a couple of bird-feeders on fence-post and rebar stands made from salvaged materials because the birds were already kinda nosing around back there so why not give them a reason to hang around.
Then we had one hell of a drought in 2011 so we added the concrete-mixing tub, again, salvaged from stuff we already had, watering hole.
And you can't leave water just sit there without it turning into a mosquito nursery, hense the pump to keep the water moving. And the rocks were added so the birds would have safe places to stand on, and to help the various frogs and toads dropping by to get back out again.
The two small "benches" (there used to be three but one rotted completely away) are actually stands I threw together for displaying some of my found-wood carvings in a gallery.
Turns out that whole gallery scene just isn't me, so naturally they eventually ended up here.
In keeping with the 'build it piece by piece over time with no particular plan' theme, the water tower thingy there came from the greenhouse.
The original idea was that a 7 gallon bucket of water, sitting in the rounded top portion, would gavity-feed a drip-system through a timer/valve. Turns out even the low-presure/gravity-feed valves designed for gravity-systems like this aren't reliable. So that was a failed experiment.
Even though we built it with salvaged fence boards and a few scraps of dimentional lumber (we still have a waist-high stack of fence boards down in the tractor barn), giving up on it completely just seemed wrong, so it ended up here.
Now, instead of a bucket, the upper part houses the outdoor end of an indoor/outdoor thermometer and a gazillion spiders.
One day we stumbled across this Victorian dress-form contraption and thought maybe it would add a little class to an otherwise classless space.
I recently spruced her up with the leftovers of a few rattle-cans.
Don't remember where we picked up the blue-glass and steel finial. I used the bird as a model for a few carvings and one day drug it out of the back of a dusty shelf and put it out here because - well, why not?
The amber lady with vertical holes for cut-flower-stems around the base has history because I'm officially clasified as an antique and can remember her sitting in a bespoke arched niche (my teenage dad and his father custom-built the house) just inside the front door of my grandmother's house (Pumpa died early so it was always grandma's house) from the earliest memories I can drag up.
It moved with her to a smaller, more manageable, house, then to San Miguel de Alende Mexico, and came back to Michigan when she could no longer care for herself.
Because I mentioned it in her eulogy, I ended up with it (the matching basin it sat in had long since disapeared) and here she is.
Neither one of us has any idea where the glass frog came from, probably a resale-shop find, but where else would you keep a frog?
Same for the lizard. (OK, so I have a thing for lizards) Which we just recently recovered, half buried in the dirt near The Wife’s barn, tarted up with more of those leftover rattle-cans (it was originally all a faded green), and perched next to the watering hole on a couple of orphaned clay-pot bases that have nowhere else to be.
The cactus has been around since the early days of the main barn.
When I wired up the barn I had some heavy copper grounding wire left over, and you never waste copper! So I shaped it into a cactus and wrapped some more copper, smaller 12 gauge this time, around it to flesh it out a little.
Because the weathered copper was blending into the background I recently brightened it up. (Good Lord! Will these cans ever run empty!)
OK, so this did actually take longer than I thought, but other than the Lemon Ball Sedum the racoons and I have been battling over, that's it.
Coincidence? This fawn was born in front of us down at the base of the meadow on the first of June, about the same time my cousin, after decades of living with it, finally succumbed to the complications of MS.
Usually, after that initial 'newborn look', mom tucks the fawn out of sight for a couple of months and leaves us wondering. But this morning, the day of my cousin's memorial, mom trots her week and a half old fawn out for us.
It was pretty special.
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