Silly Saturday : : Smelling the Flowers

We were up early this morning, having decided it would be a good idea to get our walk in before it got too hot. We took Ozzie to the swimming hole where he retrieved his sticks five or six times and then was ready to head home. I was quite happy to sit under the lower arbor in the shade and read the newspaper. I should have stuck to the garden section....

The stone table is made out of a wrought iron base that I got from a salvage store and a slab of flagstone we found in a place we fondly called "The Rock Store",  Even in Berkeley where the soil wasn't half rocks as it is here, people paid large amounts of money to buy big rocks, and even greater sums to have them moved to their desired locations. We ourselves went there and shopped through the baskets of rocks and rows of giant boulders from all over the world. We installed a modest sized rock in our front yard which was much loved by our yellow cat, Angus, as a place to hang out. 

I had a friend whose house burned to the ground in the East Bay Hills fire. She designed and built a new modern house with a mediterranean style garden. She bought an enormous boulder which had to be trucked on the freeway and up narrow roads and lifted over her glass house into her walled garden with a large crane. 

But I digress. The little stone table stood on our postage size Berkeley patio for years. Without knowing exactly why, we decided to bring it with us, it nonetheless immediately found a perfect home at the bottom of the stairs to the upper arbor. We use it as a temporary resting place for things that need to go up the stairs, which is how the pots of lantana ended up on it. They're part of the wall project, but can't go into the ground until Dana and OilMan finish their wall.

The cow made out of found objects was a gift from son Tim and family, and somehow took up residence in the herb bed until she became engulfed in parsley, at which point someone put her on the table. She seems quite happy there coexisting with clippers, pots, bags of birdseed, buckets of dirt and rocks. Even though she herself is made out of junk, she gives the table and its random contents a little silly class...

With temperatures expected to climb to three digits for the next few days, I have retreated indoors and turned the air conditioning on.