I pledge you my trough

When I was home in December 2010, my father and I took a drive to Pleasant Point on the Eastern Shore. While wandering around our cousin's property (Dad's first cousin, my "once-removed" from me, you see), I saw this stump with crowberry, or Empetrum growing on it. It's a lovely stump (I think I blogged it back when I first saw it), and I fell in love with crowberry even more that day. I think we have a tendency to overlook our common native plants. I know I did. What is crowberry to the glories of heather, etc., etc. Well, I still love heather, but I love crowberry too.



This stump became my inspiration when I decided to finally try making some hypertufa things this summer. The trough of the blog post title is in the next two photos. I used two old plastic dish-washing basins as the form for this trough.* I found some crowberry growing in at transition of some very compressed gravel and some very wet clay. I found random bits of sedum and a tiny sempervivum already growing in the yard. I used composted leaf mulch, peat and sand for the soil, and mulched the whole shebang with pea gravel and old mussel shells. And this past December the crowberry took on the deep reddish winter tone and the sedum started to colour up and...! I was pretty happy with my first adventure in hypertufa.



My favourite part of the hypertufa-making was carving and smoothing and adding texture to the still-soft concrete.

All planted and settled in for the winter. *Just typing trough at the moment confuses my brain. Through? Troff? tr-owf?