The Iron Mermaid Comes to the Rescue

Many years ago dear friends bought me a charming birdbath for my birthday. I loved it, but unfortunately it had design flaws. The bowl was shallow and didn’t hold enough water for birds to bathe.

I tried it as a bird feeder, but the top wasn’t stable, and somehow it kept tipping and chunks chipped off with every fall. My husband suggested throwing the thing out and starting over, but it isn’t easy to throw away a concrete birdbath, especially not one that was a gift from friends.

So I put the thing in the shed and hoped for inspiration. It took another twenty years and an iron mermaid to give me the idea of how to bring that broken birdbath out of storage.

I spotted the mermaid at a gardening store. Maybe the nursery put some kind of pheromones on it, because my decision to buy was instantaneous and irrevocable. I seldom buy garden knickknacks, but this lady insisted on coming home with me. She was rusty and highlighted with such an appealing shade of green that for a time I considered painting our rusticated house in those exact colors.

For a while she perched in a nook of our arbutus tree. It was an odd placement for a mermaid, but she seemed fine there. Over the months I moved her here and there in the garden and brought her inside a few times to see if she might like to live on the living room mantel.

Then one Sunday afternoon I took a nap, and when I awoke I had a vision of using the birdbath for a planter. It seemed so obvious, I couldn’t fathom why I hadn’t thought of it before.

But first I had to repair the broken top. I found a leftover container of sticky filler glop I’d bought for a home repair job. It might as well have been labeled “birdbath repair compound,” because it worked perfectly to glue all the bits together.

I found a place in the garden, leveled the base, and then for stability I put a big dollop of the sticky compound on the joint between the base and the bowl. When it was firm, I mounded gravel, added soil, and planted donkey tail sedum to drape all around.

So far so good, but the arrangement needed a finishing touch, something for the top and center. Hmmm…what about the iron mermaid? She would look lovely sitting atop her sea of sedum. 

And so it came to pass.