What Does Heaven Look Like?

What does heaven look like, I wonder.

I think it might look a lot like my work table.



Only without this wonky shrinky dink garden spider.



I made this piece out of a circle of shrinky dink material and when I shrunk it, it got all wonky. Grrrr. Let me just say, I have a lot of trouble with round. Not just round shrinky dinks that shrink up all wonky, but most round things. I gave up throwing pots on a wheel because I just could not be constrained by round.



I do like the spider, though.

Dave, of course, is not bothered by round. He still throws pots on a wheel.



He threw those pots after I suggested that it was a bit ridiculous for a potter to have to pay for commercially made pots. (As we did for our last round of plants.)



This little house spider took up residence in our stack of pots between the time Dave brought them home from the studio and when we were ready to use the pots. Sorry, spidey, this can't be your new home. (We shooed her into the garden.)



And then I painted the three smaller pots with a wash of blue acrylic paint. (I like the stripey one.) I wanted them to be pretty little homes for our new plants.





That's a basil, of course, but the plants in the top photo are grasses mostly, with the exception of this little beauty.



That's a hardy living stone plant. Dave and I saw it and we absolutely had to have it.



Look at that! Its primitive ugliness is positively glorious, no?

The biggest repotting job was an aloe that is the offspring of one of my grandmother's aloes. My grandmother used to grow the most amazing aloes ever. She's pot them in coffee cans with dirt from the yard and they were the most content plants ever. They grew and grew and bloomed even. When they'd outgrow their pots, she'd split them up and pot them into new coffee cans. She gave away tons of those things.



She gave one to Dave and he's kept it for years and years in a little four-inch pot. It outgrew the pot about three years ago, turning into this massive unruly thing.It took Dave a long time to break apart the aloe into managable pieces.



Those are just two of the six aloes that we potted from that one plant.

Crazy.