Papyrus

Looking out the kitchen window at the goldfinches bathing in the "water feature"I remembered how close we came to taking it out when we first moved here because we thought it was so ugly. Other things were more pressing ,and by the time they were finished we realized we loved the three stark, upright basalt columns with water incongruously bubbling out of the top of one of them.They were so popular with the birds, and we get hours of pleasure watching hummingbirds, finches, thrushes, woodpeckers, and even an occasional jay or crow sipping, dipping and soaking  there.

The other day as I watched a goldfinch immerse himself directly under the water bubbling off one of the rocks we'd placed on top I thought, 'What this fountain needs is some papyrus." I decided to fill the frame in today's shot with the dwarf papyrus we found at a pond plant and dwarf conifer place in Sebastopol. They also have koi in all different sizes and colors. Oh and pigeons….Only in Sebastopol.

The problem came when OilMan and I got into a chicken and egg type argument. Since they only had four of  plants left, I thought we should buy them and keep them in a bucket of water until we are ready to plant them. His engineering mind kicked in and he wanted to remove all the rocks from the base of the fountain and perhaps even the fountain rocks themselves to figure out where we could plant the papyrus. I could picture tearing the whole thing apart only to find out that there were no more papyrus to be had.

OilMan won that round, but they'd better not be sold out of dwarf papyrus when we have basalt columns, pebbles, rocks and spheres, pumps and reservoirs all over the front steps….