The quest for free garden art continues

You know you have issues when you set out to just take the dogs to the beach for a walk and you end up 45 minutes later driving your lawn mower down the beach. But that’s exactly what happened on Sunday.

This was the view from the lawn mower on Sunday. It’s way too early for lawn mowing here, but who doesn’t like to go for a relaxing ride on the beach? That’s Mr. Much More Patient and Rita (Hudson is in the water off to the left) following. He got to drive the lawn mower down the beach and I drove it back.


You know I have a thing for driftwood. I love it for a lot of reasons, but I really do like it in the garden. Sunday was a good day to be on the lookout because last week we had a couple days of big storms, which had the good fortune (for me) of causing some rocking waves that pushed a lot of stuff up on the beach, followed by a big seiche to uncover a lot more of it.
If you’re not familiar with seiches, and you didn’t realize that the water level in the Great Lakes changes (and not just seasonally but sometimes hourly), think of it as sort of a tide, although some descriptions say it is better compared to a tsunami. Basically changes in air pressure, move the water in the lake around, and on Sunday, the high pressure that had come in dragged a whole lot of water eastward toward Michigan, meaning that my next piece of garden art had been unearthed.

Don’t you collect garden art with a set up like this all the time?
 
It’s a lovely tree trunk portion, with a root that juts out to look a little bit like a whale vertebrae. It’s got a lot of character.
The problem with these little finds, though, is that they are often water logged, which means they are really heavy. Fortunately Mr. Much More Patient knows that finding free garden art in front of our unsuspecting neighbors’ houses means I won’t be buying garden art and he’s happy to help.

So that’s how we ended up hooking up the garden cart to our decrepit freebie riding lawn mower, cutting through our neighbor’s yard and driving that baby down the beach to collect our little find.
We’ll see where it ends up, but I think one of the new gardens I have planned for the back yard would be a pretty great place for it.