Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Evidence of a past gardener…

I grew up in a house my parents had built for us, the newness and sense of possibility were very exciting. No one had ever lived there before, it was all ours! However as an adult I've become quite sentimental about connections to past residents of my homes. To mark the purchase of my house in Spokane, I had the privilege of sharing a toast of "Uncle Shorty's scotch" with the executor of the estate. It came complete with heartfelt reminiscing about the time he and his siblings spent visiting their favorite aunt and uncle in the home that was now mine.

Our home here in Portland has had at least five owners, we met the most recent residents during the process of buying the home, but it's the ones that came before that have me curious, because I've found things they've left behind. The first was this little Bakelite box...

Digging out some ugly over-grown ferns my shovel unearthed it, wrapped in foil. Something was inside; we were going to be rich!! No such luck, it was an old house key which no longer worked in any of the locks.

Cleaning out the drawers of a huge old cabinet in the garage Andrew found these fabulous seedling pots. Could these have actually come with a nursery purchase? They're beautiful.

I haven’t allowed myself to use them, I'm afraid of accidentally breaking one.

In the rafters of the garage we found these marvelous wooden crates.

Still filled with their wooden inserts! The seed label was also a garage find.

Red Fescue, 1957…98.53 per cent pure!

These brass nozzles with their beautiful patina were unearthed a year apart.

The first one in the front garden during last year’s Bishops Weed dig. And the second this spring as I dug sod to enlarge the planting borders (photos coming soon, I promise). They were buried several feet away from the hose bibb and under a lot of soil. How did they get there? I don’t use them but I treasure them just the same. Have you found any treasures left behind by a past gardener?

All material © 2009-2013 by Loree Bohl for danger garden. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

34 comments:

  1. Those are such great finds. All I've found in my garden is concrete, tile, and lead window weights. What cool thing are you going to do with the crates?

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    1. The lead window weights are kind of cool! I don't have a clue about the crates. I really like them but have no brilliant ideas, you?

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  2. I would save that key...who knows maybe you'll end up digging out a big old safe :D
    Those seedling pots are really amazing, why can't I find something so nice...all I dig out are old bones and shells :/

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    1. Oh man...a safe, that would be fabulous! Old bones huh? That could be a little creepy.

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  3. Why aren't those seedling pots on display in the house somewhere? Beautiful!

    I've only found one notable remnant in the yard of my 42 year-old house: a table knife that was jammed point down next to the concrete walkway. Interestingly enough it has a bamboo pattern on it -- a hint of things to come?

    (I got the best old stuff from my neighbor's garage when they moved: old pipes and windows. Haven't used the windows in the garden yet though.)

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    1. The pots are on display in the garage. There is a little shelf in front of the window and I have them stacked there. It makes me happy to see them.

      Oh I love the knife story! My brothers and I used to play in the sand and gravel left over from construction with my moms flatware. I think we lost a lot of it out there, no doubt to be found by a future resident.

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  4. Such cool stuff! Our house had one previous owner, and they had two little kids. The only evidence I've found of them in the garden is painted rocks. Love those wooden boxes, and the marbled colors on the seedling pots are great!

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    1. And have you kept and used/displayed the painted rocks?

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  5. Sadly, I've never really found anything of note...just a few broken bricks. Then again, it's better than our last house, where I found lots of broken glass and rusty nails!

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    1. Ya broken glass and nails could certainly change your day, and not for the better. I have found chucks of terra cotta pots...which is kind of odd.

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  6. Our garden was littered with children's toys. They were tucked everywhere. I ran into the former owner and mentioned it and she said that she deliberately cast toys into the garden for her grandchildren to find, like little treasures.

    It sounds charming until your 18-month-old wanders up with a dirty car in his mouth. I guess I don't have to worry about my kids being raised in too sterile and environment.

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  7. What great finds. Nothing so wonderful in my garden, just some shards of broken china and a sweet old 3" tall clear glass bottle. There's a yellowed poster from the 40's or 50's published by Sunset Magazine that tells gardeners what to do during each month of the year tacked to the side of a shelf in our basement. Of course the yard came complete with an old matress and a rusty but not interesting kids bike.

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    1. The Sunset poster sounds pretty cool, but the mattress, yuck!

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  8. For 10 years I lived on the street behind where my grandparents lived my hole life. I loved marbels as a child and played with them at my grandparents house a lot. Every now and then, while digging in my yard I would come across and old marbel. I can't tell you how much that tickled me. I made my sister a potted grouping of plants and included a couple of the marbels and told her how I had found "my marbels"....lol...you know, "have you lost your marbels"...lol

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    1. I love this! Marbles would be a fun find anyway but with the history even better.

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  9. I love finding treasures like these. The wooden crates are particularly nice.

    Unfortunately, our house was less than 10 years old when we bought it and the previous owner didn't leave anything behind.

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    1. Better nothing than garbage though right? It seems every house I've moved into or had friends move into has come complete with a stash of old half full and dried up paint cans.

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  10. I'm jealous. I just find broken glass in my garden :(

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  11. Evocative, interesting finds with rich stories behind them. What a treasure hunt you can have just poking around in your soil and in the rafters.

    Our house is brand new, so with no previous owners there is no mystery to dig up. It was built in an old cow pasture, so I do dig up pieces of barbed wire and rotting fence posts occasionally. No cow carcasses thank goodness.

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    1. Barbed wire could be ugly...but not as bad as a cow carcass!

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  12. fifi la fontaineMay 29, 2013

    You're soooo lucky to find such beautiful things so relevant to your interests in your house and yard. Our house/yard had bits of rusted tools, nails and the aforementioned broken glass. There was, however, a broken terracotta horse head that I stuck in the pot that my Mediterranean blue fan palm tree is planted in. I like that piece.

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    1. A horse head! That's pretty fabulous.

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  13. Wow those are great finds all. I love the box that had the key that no longer opens any doors.... And, no, no finds in our gardens but glacial rock deposits. WE are called the 'Granite State' for good reason

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    1. Must make planting a tree challenging.

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  14. They're all definite keepers, especially those lovely seedling pots. It's really nice to find 'nice' relics of the past, the history of the past residents of your house. We've found a few things through the years, nothing as nice as your collection though.

    Not gardening related but when we stripped the wallpaper off our second bedroom we found the original 1930s wallpaper, and underneath that was the bare wall but painted on it were the words 'Babbys Room'. It was a sweet find but made us wonder if that Babby is still alive.

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    1. Reading along I was afraid this story was going to take a horror-movie like turn. I like 'Babbys Room' much better.

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  15. Funny, I was just thinking of this myself today and thinking I need to do a post on that...Although our house dates back to the early 1950s, I haven't found much related to the earliest period; however, quite a few useful (if not interesting) things were left by the last 2 owners (both tenants for relatively short periods). I wish I found something like your seedling pots or those wood crates...

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  16. The old brass nozzles are my favorites...reminds me of my father and helping him water or wash the car.

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    1. There is something familiar to me about them too, can't say whether it was my parents or grandparents but I know someone in my past had one of them.

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  17. Our house in town was built in 1902. When we took up the floor, the underlayment consisted of old newspapers, primarily comics pages with long since discontinued strips. In the basement of an earlier house were aerial photos showing the shadow of the hang gliding photographer. Sadly, that person died in a hang-gliding accident, quashing my budding interest in that sport.

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  18. I love that plant tag, and the receipt--one used to buy grass seed by the pound out of a bin, instead of all corporately packaged up and marketed to death.

    Our property never had a house on it, didn't even have citrus trees on it because there was a big hunk of brown granite in the way. The guy in back used it as his driving range so there were golf balls here and there. The landscape contractor's guys--one of them left bottles of this "non alcoholic sangria" everywhere, a couple of inches under the soil. Hmmm...

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