my favorite missing pot

If anyone has seen a pot for sale like this one, please let me know!

This past week Bill and I have been working on the planting beds in front of our barn-house. Before all the construction on the old pole barn began, these beds were overfilled with lantana, purple fountain grass, prickly pear cactus, agave, and some unknown plant we called the pokey plant for its very sharp needle-leaves that hurt anyone fool enough to touch them.

Much was trampled by carpenters, some was pulled out because of extreme overgrowth, and we lost the cacti in last year’s freak “snowmageddon”. As we replant fountain grass and prickly pear cactus, I am also moving my container herb garden to the front. It’s been next to the back patio but didn’t get enough sun there.

And I find myself missing this favorite herb pot more than ever. A gift from our daughter after she first moved to Texas, it grew many herbs as well as hens & chicks over the years. This sketch is from 2008, just a year after I began keeping sketchbook journals. Two years after this sketch, the much loved pot was stolen from our front garden by thieving orcs — and I have never found another quite like it. How I wish I could!

A couple of other sketches from this old sketchbook: my sweet Maine Coon cats, Beorn Bearcat and Dali, keeping watch out the front window, and The Church of the Savior, the small stone church in the Riverside district of Wichita, Kansas. It was here in 2005 that I first learned how to watercolor from a very talented artist, John Lokke. We called ourselves the Riverside Watercolor Society and had so much fun painting together! The group has now scattered all over the country but I often think of the good times we had.