Holey Rocks, Batman!

 Before I get to the point of this post (do I ever?) I have to back up again....I warned you.

Circles in the garden intrigue me.

Along with my thyroid problem, you may recall I also suffer from GADS, Gardener's Attention Deficit Syndrome.  We've found to our dismay that GADS is quite contagious, since Carl has been afflicted, too.  I'm not sure if the condition is hereditary or not, but exposure to people who are in the midst of a GADS flareup can be dangerous.

 Our youngest son, Dave, apparently has a strong immune system when it comes to GADS, and fled at the first sign of my disordered thinking and behavior, but alas, our eldest, Joel, was not so lucky.  Joel found himself mired for years in the entire process of the construction of the Quarry,  Formal Garden and dome, Pachyberm, Thing One and Thing Two gardens, and of course, the never-ending Castle Aaargh saga.

Joel finally did manage to escape the madness a few years ago, but every now and then he suffers a relapse, especially this past summer when we were getting ready for the August tenth double-header garden walk/booyah party/Hamburger parade.  Since Joel was cooking the booyah with his friend, Paul and had invited his friends and coworkers, he felt obligated to help us get ready for the big day. Luckily, he was spared a completely random outbreak of GADS, though Carl wasn't as fortunate.

Carl had taken off the week before the party to get ready and his constant exposure to my irrational thinking led him to fall victim to another GADS/Creative Thinking outbreak:

 Holey Rocks.

For years we've collected rocks from quarries and rock piles, no news there if you know us.  Our most prized finds have always been rocks with holes in them, like these:

And these:

Most of these metamorphic rocks were found on rock piles and who knows what caused the holes to form; effects of erosion, glacier, lava, etc.?  I could guess, but I'd be wrong.  We simply liked them and decided to put them all together in one place in the garden.

But these aren't the only holey rocks we have in our collection.  Whenever we wandered around in limestone quarries, we always kept a lookout for 'blast hole' rocks.   I'm sure that's not the proper term, but these are the rocks that had been drilled through in order to insert dynamite for blasting in the quarry.  Over the years, we've found a few:

Blast hole showing a five-sided pattern from drill bit

Perfectly rounded stone found in a load of rock during our Quarry construction

Cracked pillar held together by gravity.

 So this leads me to my most recent GADS-y idea:  I was on my way to the compost pile with a load of weeds on the trailer when my gaze happened to rest on the rock in the picture above.  The 'pillar' was a rock we had picked up at a quarry long ago and since it was broken, it was lying on the old stone pile we've been working on cleaning up.  I stopped the lawnmower and loaded the broken stone up and headed back to talk to Carl.  

Now remember, we were in the midst of trying to get ready for the big to-do the next day, and we didn't need any more work to do....but when I told Carl that I thought this holey rock would look kinda neat standing upright in the hosta bed, he agreed.  Then I said it was too bad we didn't have more than just three of the 'real ones'  around here because they'd look better in a group, and it happened.  

Carl said he could make some more.

Make some more?  How?

Well, it involved a concrete drill and a diamond hole saw.  And a coupla hours that we didn't have to waste on another goofy idea.  But the end result turned out kind of interesting.

Can you spot the Real Holey Rock?  It's on the right.

First, we drilled the two pillar-y shaped stones we had lying around to match the original.  Then Carl had the idea of putting stained glass in one of the holes:

And since we had the drill out and a mess already, we went out and searched the rock piles and found three more rocks with matching radius curves already in place.  Carl had been saving these rocks for something special for some time and the time had arrived.

Hard to see here, but if you look at the rocks from the right angle, you can see right through. Ok, we're weird.

We located all three rocks, drilled holes in them and then hauled them to the garden.  We weren't sure how to display them, but so far, this is the configuration:

When seen from the side, they look pretty odd.

Ok, seen from ANY angle, they're odd.

This is one of those 'artsy' sculpture-y things you have to see in person to appreciate (or hate).  Yes, it's odd, I completely agree.  When the tour groups came through the next day, some people thought the idea was interesting, some thought it was bizarre, and some didn't even notice.

But I smile every time I walk through the garden and see the three of them looking back at me.

GADS....be careful, you never know where it will lead you.