You may have heard of nastursiums. I just love this plant, as it’s not only colorful and beautiful to look at, both the leaves and flowers are edible. It adds great color and taste to salads and dishes that we really enjoy. I couldn’t say how many seeds we have planted. Suffice it to say – a lot! Apparently, the bunnies find them tasty as well, as we have caught bunnies on several occasions munching away and then hopping off.

If you read my post about our sundial (https://kritterspaw.com/2023/10/15/dont-do-this-at-home/), we recently built a retaining wall that included two paver stone pads we built. Our intent was to build some interesting art for the two pads. The sundial being the first, most straight forward project.

For the second pad art, we decided to make a ‘bunny pad’ with nastursiums. Since we couldn’t grow nastursiums, why not build them. And to complete the scene we purchased an outdoor bunny to leap through the nastursium patch.

I must admit this is one of our more creative projects and required a lot of visualization. We started by making prototype nastursium leaves. We tested metal blades fitted to our scroll saw. After breaking a number of blades we scrapped the idea and tried a nibbler attachment mounted to our power drill.

Once we had a number of cardboard patterns drawn up we laid them out on sheet metal to build our mock-ups. With the flat metal irregular disks cut, we had to figure out how to make them look like leaves, so we began cutting individual wires and spot welding them onto the disks. This proved to be a very tedious task, so we abandoned it in favor of a chisel and hammer.

We painted a few to see how them might look and once we found the method viable we began production and built a hundred leaves.

Now that we had plenty of leaves built we had to ponder the base.

We bent rebar around the ID of the paver ‘bunny’ pad, and began bending and welding spiral ‘stems’ around it.

Now that we had the base built, it’s time to figure out how to attach the leaves. We used wire to coil the stems around the base ‘vines’, making sure the leaves could be detachable so that the base and leaves could be separately painted.

We mig welded the coiled stem to the base to permanently attach.

We moved on to the flowers, and built several metal flowers that didn’t come out well. So we sought the internet and found some stamped flowers we thought would work. We bought two different flowers in hopes that one would do the job. Once we had them in hand, we found neither to be sufficient by itself, so we opted to build an assembly of the two flowers, and some custom bent wires for stamin.

We began the tedious task of punching and grinding holes in each flower to accept a screw to assemble them.

Next we bent the stamin to build each individual flower. We figure for the 100 flowers we built, 5 stamin each, we made 500 individual stamins for each flower. A time consuming task to be sure.

Finally with a hundred flowers built, we could move on to meticuously attaching them to our base, intermixed with our nastursium leaves.

Once we had finally completed the manufacture and assembly of all the flowers and leaves, we had to take it back apart to paint each. The base would be a dark green, while the leaves a lighter leafy green.

The flowers were to be painted 4 different colors and then individually detailed.

With all the painting completed, we could re-assemble all the leaves and flowers n the base, hoping to get them all in the ‘right’ pleasing location.

By now, you’re thinking, holy crap, why bother to go to so much work. Admittedly, sometimes we ask ourselves the same thing! But it’s art, a concept not shared by all. Something that resonates with the eye of the beholder for it’s beauty and the emotion it evokes.

The Oxford dictionary defines art as ‘the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power’. For us, it’s a creative outlet and challenging endeavor that allows us to solve problems while creating something interesting, unique, and fun. This particular project has been a test of our power of visualization, ingenuity, and innovation…. and it is definitely, one of a kind.

Indeed, people have all kinds of hobbies. Some are content to sit back and watch tv. I always lament, ‘it keeps us out of the bars’. More than that, our projects give us a creative, thoughtful outlet, keep us busy, engaged, and add an attractive decoration. If we’re lucky, it’s thought-provoking and intriguing.