Turning the Tables in Garden Decor

A SCENE IN MY ROOFTOP GARDEN

The ability to define my goals in salient points does not come easily to me. It never has. I tend to view most matters in layers and get caught up in possibilities. As a young junior high-school student, I agonized over the standardized PSAT when it came to multiple choice questions. The traditional choices for those test questions was usually something like this: Sometimes option "a" but never option "b" when "e" and "f" are present. On one occasion, when I questioned the teacher about various scenarios (which were delaying me from being able to go on to the next page), I was put out in the hallway, with masking tape bound over my mouth, and told "when you are ready to stop asking questions and make a quick choice you, can come back to the classroom."

This problem of taking too much time to weigh the answers in multiple-choice test questions occurred in test-taking again, when I was in high-school and took the SAT. There was a test question about how many clothes-pins it would take to hang laundry on a clothes-line. I found myself thinking, 'hmmmm, that depends . . . is the clothing heavy jeans and towels, or is it something light such as under garments?' I lost all my test taking time on those types of test questions, and since SAT scores are based on time as well as knowledge.

Fortunately, I passed the SATs with a score high enough to get into college, and I used my layered thinking to my advantage, graduating from the university with honors. My graduating from college, and my deliberating over option A and option B in relation to test questions, was a number of years ago, but the inclination to consider various scenarios of a given issue still prevails. 

For example, nearly ten years ago I found a wooden table (an image of it can be seen in the image at the top of this posting) at a local Flea Market. It seemed like quite a find at the time because it "matched" two chairs that I already owned. The table turned out to be a bit too high for the enjoyment of herb infused cocktails when sitting in those chairs, so I had to replace it which I did with a find from a used furniture shop, and it has been a mainstay in my urban garden for years to come which can be seen in photos that include the table in a previous post.

As for the fate of the wooden table, being a layered thinker, I turned it into a stand, specifically a "salad bar" where I attempted to grow salad greens such as tatsoi, dandelion, red lettuce, green lettuce, and green mustard (as seen below).

A SCENE IN MY MY ROOFTOP GARDEN

It had been my hope that my dinner guests could pick their own salad. I quickly learned that no mater how much loving care I gave my salad greens (and reds), they did not grow very well in terra-cotta containers. 

Therefore, over the following years the table supported a terra-cotta bowl filled with either Dragon's Blood Red Sedum plants, Amazon Sunset plants, Ajuga plants, and even Thymus Argenetus (Silver Thyme) plants. This can be seen in the corresponding photographs posted below.

A SCENE IN MY ROOFTOP GARDEN

A SCENE IN MY ROOFTOP GARDEN

A SCENE MY ROOFTOP GARDEN

A SCENE IN MY ROOFTOP GARDEN

Of course, this answer for the use of my table proved to be far from infinite. The table-top's wood became increasingly stressed by my watering the various plants, and by the table-top being subject to outdoor conditions of rain, hail, sleet and snow. 

The table-top's wood eventually warped, but I had every intention of replacing it — with lumber that I could order cut to size — so I could continue using the table as a plant stand.

Doing this became unnecessary when another layered thinker, Juan (who did the trivet installation for my Cheerful Cherry Farm Autumn Clematis to climb upon, which  I wrote about in a previous post), removed the wood, and placed my potted Fagus sylvaitca (Beech Tree) into the table's remaining rim. 

The result was extraordinary as seen in the images below.

A SCENE FROM MY ROOFTOP GARDEN

Not only does my Beech Tree appear to love its new "home;" the passion vine, trailing on the rail behind it, is flourishing too. Moreover my 'Shigitatsu Sawa'- seen here with its golden-rose autumn leaves — enjoys (evidenced by its thriving) being alongside it. (An image of the 'Shigitatsu Sawas' leaves in front of the rim of the Beech Tree's pot was seen in a previous post.)

For your information, dear reader, Juan used the old wood from the table as a "footer" to balance one of  my heavy pots containing a shrub - truly turning the table's use in my garden.