Garden art is where you find it !!

I'll try to keep this short. A couple of years ago my wife and I bought 15 acres for our horses. A creek runs through the place and we were exploring our mini farm deciding what trees to cut and what trees to plant and where to put the barn and such. In a patch of weeds beside the creek we were shocked to discover a bunch of tombstones scattered about and then piles of tombstones and those little marble jars that sit on both sides of a tombstone and marble crosses and such. We were dumbstruck !! No one had mentioned there was a cemetary on our property. Who could have done this !! We got to looking at some of the stones and things didn't seem quite right. Some of the names were mispelled, Wiliam with one L, the middle part of an O broken out. Turns out the property was once owned by a guy who owned a local tombstone business and he had used his rejects and replacement stones to fill in erosion area's on the place !! How cool !!!

I made a bench out of one tombstone with two more for the feet and we used three or four of the marble jar things just scattered about a flower bed, the pedestels they sit on were broken off. Best part was two column bases, intact except for some chips here and there. One is a base for a bird bath and the other is a base for a concrete fluted column I made for a front yard flower bed. There are a couple of marble crosses I have plans for later this fall.

Check with any local tombstone carvers or companies in your town and ask what they do with their rejects, you might be able to pick up(no pun intended) some nice stone for a few bucks or for free.

Des