A Round About Story About A Concrete Sphere

Years ago, I fell in love with the concrete "dinosaur eggs" made by the wonderful garden artists George Little and David Lewis on Banbridge Island.  To see some of their amazing work, go here.  Their book, A Garden Gallery  is full of more images.  Unfortunately, their garden gallery closed to visitors in 2013.  Anyway, the eggs were gorgeous but the prices were beyond my garden budget so I decided to try to make them myself.  Having very little experience with concrete other than making leaf castings, of which Little and Lewis are masters, there were many rather humorous mishaps in trying to get concrete to stick to a plastic exercise ball.  At the time I was very active in the forums on a great website called Dave's Garden  and posted this picture of my attempts at creating spheres.  Another member of D.G. named Hostajim posted commentary about his process,  You can see the exchange in the forum here.

While nothing even approaching the splendor of the  Little and Lewis eggs, these were very inexpensive but did take a lot of work.  The smaller one became the blue egg you may remember from this image from my very first post three years ago. 

The larger one became home to this dinosaur hatchling. 

Hostajim, AKA James King went much further than I and perfected making beautiful lightweight spheres.  In an interesting twist, Jim is a friend of the sculptor James Kelsey for whom I was fusing cobalt glass that he included in his sculpture in front of the Tacoma Police Headquarters and smaller pieces at each of the TPD stations.  One afternoon, Kelsey was coming to the stained glass studio to bring specks or something and King came along with three of his fabulous spheres to show me.  What a cool surprise!  I would have bought all three but didn't have my checkbook with me.  Life got busy and the spheres slipped my mind.  Jim mentioned that he'd taken some to Dragonfly Farms and it wasn't until I saw them there that I remembered how well made they were.

Just last summer,  I had the pleasure of touring my blogging pal, Tatyana's (My Secret Garden - find her blog here.) gorgeous Gig Harbor garden and was very surprised to see one of Jim's eggs!  It seems that Tatyana toured her friend Jim's garden on a Northwest Perennial Alliance tour where she purchased this one, the first that he had sold.

In fact, Tatyana did a marvelous post about Jim's garden here.

Tatyana graciously allowed me to use the following two pictures that she took of the spheres in Jim's Garden.

In their natural habitat.

If you're still reading at this point, you're probably wishing that I'd grab the controls and bring this thing in for a landing.  So, here it is...

Last I heard, Jim was no longer creating spheres due to his health so on my recent trip to Dragonfly, where a few of his spheres still are available, I finally purchased one.  Only nine years after first seeing them.  If I only had such restraint with plants...

So, here are the two eggs together. The third is a spherical plant pot tilted up a bit. In looking at the picture, I think that they need a bit of adjustment to look their best and the blue one needs to be repainted but all in all I'm delighted to finally have one of Jim's creations in my garden.