Working with wood and rocks outside

      When I lived in Missouri, I dreamed of having beautifully aged terra cotta pots and garden rocks sporting a thick coating of bright green moss.

(A beautiful arrangement, plucked from a Canadian hillside, by an old friend)

     Now, living in Florida, everything has a thick patina of something or other and occasionally it's moss.  Luckily, I still enjoy the look of it.

     Some years ago I had the amazing good fortune to be included on 2 annual trips to a remote cabin in Canada with a group of amazing women.  Both trips were paid for in exchange for my skills as a gardener and rustic crafter.  I was pretty much given free range to work with some of my favorite materials:  rocks and wood.

     

     I built 2 arbors in that garden using rudimentary tools and saplings that I thinned out of the surrounding woods.  I got a little fancier with the second arbor, building on what I had learned after making the first.

     Hopefully, they still stand, covered with climbing roses and moon flower vines.

     I also gathered tons of rocks from the surrounding hillside and carefully stacked them in order to make attractive plants stands out of cement piers from an aborted building project that could not easily be removed.

     I think I ended up making about a dozen rock surrounds and getting pretty good at it by the end.

     I've tried to replicate these sort of projects in my Florida yard with limited success.  Untreated wood rots in about 2 seasons here so the only trellis I made out of oak branches, fell apart long before the bougainvillea could even start to cover it.

     I made this planter out of a piece of wood someone trimmed off their tree.  It's pretty much as I found it and it's doing ok outside but its days are numbered.

     And there's no rocks unless I buy them!  I've dropped some cash in the past at the local rock vendor and I just can't afford to do it anymore.  I treasure those rocks like I've never treasured rocks before and I also have some scavenged pieces of cement from places where an old sidewalk was being removed.  Still, there won't be any big rock projects in my Florida yard (unless it involves sheets of granite) for some time to come.