The Avant Garden

That's right -- after three-plus years of stacking, two and a half years of blogging and one nomination for a "Least likely to make a profit off his blog" award, I have decided to sell out. I will deliver, assemble and support arches for other folks' gardens now.

If I sell any arches, I will use the money to support my sewing habit. Fabric is expensive, and nice fabric is outrageous.  

 This is the kind of thing I am talking about:
 
My garden arch in the "No One Else Has One Garden" in my front yard. 
Interested parties can e-mail me:

theavantgarden@gmail.com

 and we'll talk about it. I think $100 for an arch and one year of arch support (I come to your house and fix it if it falls) is worth $100 or more. Rocks are heavy.

 This offer available in Western North Carolina only. I am not familiar enough with the gravity in other parts of the world that I would feel comfortable doing this elsewhere (and gas is expensive), but nothing is etched in stone.

and I am not sick of it yet. Rob took pix of the River after we finally had enough rain for them to open the floodgate up at the North Fork Reservoir. It's great to see the water orange again. It's difficult to put into words how oppressed I feel by a prolonged drought. I have a hard time playing outside sometimes when the earth is dry dry dry.

I think the Turtle tired of holding his head above water:
He seems to have lost his tail.

Rob's Arch number whatever got its pedestal's feet wet, but withstood the high water:

I sweated buckets and swatted mosquitoes today as I did more in a few hours than I have done in a week. For starters, I went to the Downstream Rockpile to investigate what appeared to be some inner-restin' driftwood and took along my new Sacred Bucket of Stackador, a purple one with a horsehead on one side. I used it to build this arch:
DogArchWood on June 28, 2007

The driftwood in the foreground may end up in the Outdoor Living Room in the Avant Garden Proper. I need a coffee table to go with the loveseat, chandelier and various objets d'art. While driving down the road last week, I spied a shrubbery (a large boxwood) upside down and, inspired by my search for a new chandelier for the interior of our house, was moved to bring it home and wrap it in lights and hang it upside down like this:
Well ... no one else has one.

This is the entire Outdoor Living Room, consisting of a driftwood loveseat (a little worse for a hungry pileated woodpecker ), a rockstack, the Stewing Man sculpture and several driftwoods sticking up:
Quaint ... gemutlich, even. June 28, 2007

On a lark, I decided to rig up another of those driftwood antlers that I, like most guys my age, do about every other year:
Sign of a midlife crisis? Or just a crisis? June 28, 2007

I have so many projects going and only so much time. I need a clone or two; one to sew, one to stack and one to take the kids to the mall. We went to the mall the other night and walked around looking at things we don't wish to afford. They sell pre-ripped pants at the mall. Crikey! That's a sign of the Decline of Western Civilization.

pitter-pats on the roof as I peck these words on the keyboard. One can almost feel the Earth sighing as three days in a row now we have had rain. The River is still quite low, as Asheville has had its driest Spring since records have been kept -- 1897, I think.

 The Avant Garden has been hot, dry and quiet lately. Here's a cute one that Rob and I did at his house:
It looks "Aladdin's Lamp"-ish, aye?

The stones in the stack were necessary to balance the stones in the arch that make the handle. That same day, we did this on the site of a fallen stack that some visitor had done:

Arch with Head

A few days later, I went to the Downstream Rockpile and did the Flying Heart: 

A very hard Flying Heart ...

Here's a magic moment in Nature that only readers of this blog know about. It's the annual "Jumping of the Lemming Laurel Blossoms." The lemming laurel is a type of mountain laurel. It blooms beautifully about the same time as our rhododendrons. What is significant about the Lemming Laurel is that the fallen petals gather and line up and jump into the nearest stream. You can see that the petals that fell from this tree are gathering and lining up on the highest point of that large rock in Bent Creek. They follow the leader into the water:
Rare, indeed. Don't mention it to authorities.

 Woo-hoo! I hear thunder outside. That means serious rain, I hope. I better turn this computer off before it gets zapped. We're off to Atlanta for the weekend. Beware of hungry dog.