Finally made it back to the Brimfield Antique Show this past weekend. Hadn’t been in years and suddenly got the flea market bug. Must be the fall weather. So what did I find?

Mostly a crapload of junk I’m not interested in. Is the poor quality of the offerings related to the crappy economy? Or am I suddenly pickier than I used to be now that we don’t have the advantage of loft space? Who knows. I drove away with just one thing…

A lantern for the garden, to drive up my Asian quotient.

Antique? Not per se. Unless stone formed over thousands of years counts as antique. According to Michael Carboni, the dealer at The Traveling Buddha’s Brimfield booth, the lantern was carved from Chinese bluestone by artisans in Northern China. He travels there for handcrafted goodies and antiques for a few months out of every year. Nice guy.

Comes in five pieces…

… and weighs about a gazillion pounds.

The bottom pieces are drilled in case you want to run electricity to it to light it up rather than use a candle. I’m unlikely to do that.

For the one gardening geek out there trying to identify plants around the lantern (click for biggification)…

Leaves of datura in the foreground, Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’ switch grass just starting to turn burgundy to the right, plumes of Miscanthus sinensus ‘Rotsilber’ (Japanese Silver Grass) waving in the background, the red-leafed tropical-looking thing is Ricinus communis (Castor Bean), yellow and green-banded Pinus densiflora ‘Oculis Draconis’ (Dragon’s Eye Red Pine) immediately behind, Matteuccia struthiopteris (Ostrich Fern) behind and to the right, Cotinus coggyria ‘Royal Purple’ (Smokebush) just to the left. Hoping this will fill in nicely in the next few years.

Tags: garden, stone

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 at 7:26 pm and is filed under garden, randomness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.