Sunday, April 21, 2013

Art and Gardens

 Yesterday was the annual "Chain of Art in the Park"--a high-end arts and crafts show. It poured down rain Friday and Saturday morning it was quite cold and wet--but the sun came out, the weather cleared, and it was a lovely day to stroll and admire creativity
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Fine art, stained glass insects--a friend of mine does beautiful enamel work.  What I really love is her eye for texture--she gathers things like seed pods, makes molds, and then casts them in silver for the bodies of her insects.
 
 


This little guy followed me home.  I decided that I really needed a snail in the butterfly garden (he's a sprinkler)


We rested for a bit when we came home, and then worked for awhile in the gardens.  I say "gardens" in the plural because we seem to keep making more.  First, it was the vegetable garden.


Bob's latest addition to this is the rain catchment barrel.  He salvaged the inner tank from a water softener out of a building that's being torn down.  The idea is that it catches rainwater, and then we can drain it into the garden as needed.  I think it will hold a bit of water--and the paint job keeps it from sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb (besides, it was fun).


Then a couple of years ago we added the butterfly garden.  Next came the grass garden--it started off with a couple of pampas grass plants, then some volunteer bamboo, and then he added other grasses to help keep rainwater from running off and into the barn.  We've got aztec grass, and lemon grass (good for cooking), some others I can't remember, and the dragon head just for fun.  He put a solar light behind the dragon's head so the eyes light up at night.

Another garden is in the works.  The area behind the barn and my cottage had sort of turned into a catch-all for junk--old storage cabinents with older cans of paint--that sort of thing.  A few weeks ago we cleaned all of that up--and because it's protected by being between two buildings, we put in an orange tree and a lime tree.  No pictures yet--no much to look at but we're fixing it up.


1 comment:

  1. Your garden makes me feel incredibly lazy! I potted some full sun flowers out front and called it a year this time around.

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