My daughter walked in the house last weekend, looked over my shoulder and gently whispered: “You have a problem.”
She noticed I was checking Ebay and Facebook marketplace for more vintage brass water hose nozzles. After re-reading this, I realized she may have a valid point, but in my defense, this is the same ‘said-daughter’ who found a perfectly chic, apartment-size kitchen bar/table with two stools — for free.
I began looking for old watering tools after seeing garden art made of antique hose nozzles during a private home garden tour in St. Louis three years ago. During one of my masked-up essential runs to Rural King during the major quarantine — maybe day No. 64 — I may have slipped one of my newly acquired nozzles into my pocket so I could find the correct threaded 5/8-inch adapters and 4-6-foot, ½” steel tubing with threaded ends. Six varied-height, brass nozzles affixed to bronze-painted, metal-tubes now stand at attention, in a semi-circle guarding the backside of a new garden.
The Hubby made time on a recent weekend to attach a dozen glass door knobs (we saved 25 years ago when renovating our chiropractic office) to sit atop copper piping — another garden project that reflects the sunlight amidst blooming, red bee balm and a multi-colored patch of coneflowers.
We really haven’t added much to the gardens this year, besides 20 yards of forest-fines mulch and replacing a few Hosta ‘Water Slides’ that are supposed to look like a 40-foot-long, meandering creek lined with small limestone rocks and filled with cedar mulch. The landscape design that I had envisioned in my mind hasn’t yet turned out exactly like the gardening magazine cover I was expecting.
Instead of planting more, it has been a spring and summer of moving things around. It has been a time of garden refinement, which means “it’s good enough for now.”
A summer of contentment.
