Life in the Garden

Wishing you a happy and safe Independence Day!

We’ve marked down many of our urns in answer to our clients who are googling “cheap urns“.   We have several pages of discount urns and urn specials, including our metal urns with secure threaded lids, as well as the popular biodegradable Shell Urn, designed for scattering ashes over water.

Any questions? Please call for personal service.

Thank you for letting us serve you.

Our Mother of Pearl urn represents the June birthstone and is available in two sizes for adults and pets.

Or if the symbol of the rose is more your style, we have several urns in the rose theme, including a 14K gold Sweetheart Rose urn necklace.

Need help making a selection?  Call toll free for personalized service.

Thank you for letting us serve you.

For families that are planning to scatter ashes over the water, the natural choice is one of our shell urns, or the aqua sea burial urn.  Families that think they can save a dollar by using the plastic temporary ash urn that they get at the funeral home are in for a surprise when the urn washes up on shore.

We’ve covered the paddle-out ceremony, popular in California and Hawaii.

Lately,  we’ve seen a trend in North Carolina purchasing the shell urn for a sea burial. The nice thing about the shell urns are that they are over sized and can fit two sets of ashes or notes, flowers, and mementos.

When scattering over a body of water a water-soluble urn can enhance the experience. Our water urns are specifically designed to gradually disperse the ashes back to the sea. Ashes can be cast directly into the water, but will often blow back at the boat and cling to the sides of the boat. This can be both frustrating and unsightly. Scattering ashes DOES NOT have to be this tricky.

A water-soluble urn will usually float for several minutes then slowly sink where it will degrade or melt back to the sea. Friends and family will often toss flowers, wreaths, or petals as a final tribute as the urn slowly drifts away.

“Tis the summer of retirement parties for many of our friends in the Queen City fire department. Like many cities across the nation, our police and fire department have some pension issues.

So we hooked up the smoker, iced the keg, tuned the instruments and kicked the first party off in a green valley just south of the garden.

And when we’re not having a hoedown, we’re hunching the keyboard and rolling out a line of high quality 14K urn jewelry for our clients.

It’s an honor to  serve our client families, but it’s hard not to be distracted by the beauty out the window.

Stay focused and:

We sold out of our last collection of Raku urns, and just picked up some new pieces that we’re slowly adding to the site.

A sampling of our latest Raku urns from the garden potter:

Celtic urns are a popular choice, and this one of a kind art piece urn uses copper glazes and features a hand-carved Celtic knot emblem.

Another copper glazed urn using the Raku technique, is the nature- themed “Fern Urn”.

The sad thing about these urns, is that the pictures don’t do them justice.  They are much more attractive than depicted here.

Remember what Memorial Day is really about.

Be safe and have fun this weekend.

Several clients have requested that we carry the metal heart keepsake urns.  We’ve just added them to our inventory and have several styles available.

The heart keepsake urns are designed to hold a small portion of ash, lock of hair or other small memento. The hearts load from the bottom and are secured with a threaded stopper.

Many of our keepsake urns have matching adult urns.

This is a glorious time in the garden.  We’re in full bloom right now.  The love-hate relationship I have with Irises? Current status:  Love them!

And despite the ant nuisance in the house,  the Peonies need them to pop. But honestly, I even had an ant in my pants! But the real test has been the recent sighting of my old pal the garter snake.

Over the last few years I’ve tried to tame my phobia of snakes, and learn to live and appreciate their finer qualities. Like the fact they like to dine on mice and crickets.

But when I spotted not just one, but two garter snakes slithering from behind my siding, I became a little unnerved.  They usually hang out by the brush pile, not this close to the house….I imagined that there’s a whole nest of them back there, and suggested to my husband that we tear the siding off the house immediately.  His response?  “Don’t worry about it, snakes can’t climb.”

Are you kidding me?  Snakes love to climb, and from behind the siding, they can easily scale the wall, access the attic, enter the crawl space in the bedroom closet, form a tangled ball of hissing and flickering tongues and drop into my bed while I’m sleeping!

Later in the day I was told to put a cork in it, hub didn’t want to hear another word about snakes in the wall.  “We should give the glory to the garter snake, after all,  the snakes are probably the reason why we didn’t have any mice for the first time in 10 years.”  All this time, I thought it was the Irish Spring.

Later that evening, I stepped out to survey the siding for signs of movement and discovered that my old cranky Border Collie had been busy protecting our property. He didn’t get them all, though, I saw another one poke his head out today.