Like most things, it started casually with a few glass balls when they were a popular garden purchase in the stores. Then, I wanted to create space to access my plants for pruning, weeding, etc and started adding stepping stones as a weaving pathway through the shrubs. For a few years, in the spring, I would pick up each stone, remove any bulbs trapped underneath and add more dirt to keep the level I wanted in the garden. It was time-consuming, but the twelve-inch round stones I bought in grey, aggregate, and red developed a pattern and became a fixture.
One day, while cleaning my house, I removed some items of ornamentation cluttering the house to the outside; if it could overwinter in the garden, this would be its new home. The idea was to still enjoy my knick-knacks, but cleaning would be unnecessary.
As my much older friends and clients have passed from this life, I added special items from their gardens that reminded me of them. The collection grew, especially as most of them loved their gardens. Everywhere I look, something in my garden reminds me of someone I knew. I am a sentimentalist.
The Blue Bottles Writing Studio got its name from the cobalt blue bottles I collected many years ago from a recycle bin. I loved the color, and when I did a little research, I found that putting blue bottles in the garden was an ancient folk-art legend that began in the Congo in the ninth century to ward off evil spirits. I added blue-bottle trees, a multi-armed spike that goes into the ground. One day a gentleman stopped me and said he’d leave me some blue plates. Eventually, they went up on a rack, which I also found for free. Now I enjoy them every day while I sit at my computer.
I love other people’s cats. But the only ones I want in my garden are the stationary ones; they look colorful, content, unruffled, and do not pee, poop, or dig in my dirt!
