Our Mary Garden

The month of May is dedicated to Mary, Mother of Jesus, so I decided it would make a good time to start a Mary Garden. In our garden, I wanted to have a statue of Mary as the focal point, but do you know how much those things cost??? The cheapest garden statue I could find was $60!

This garden area is at the end of our sunroom. It was already like this when we moved into the house years ago.

So, I painted this sign. Chris attached some posts and hammered it into the ground in our garden.

Caroline suggested we paint a picture of Mary since we didn't have a statue. So I found a piece of wood for her to paint. First, I painted the whole thing a beige color with some leftover wall paint so that it would seal the wood and hopefully allow it to withstand the weather better. It was still damp when Caroline began painting, which created a neat "wet-on-wet" effect. She also wanted to paint Joseph - painted him first, in fact. Then she painted Mary in brown and went over her again in blue. The red and green at the bottom is a flower. After it was dry, she wanted to put their names on it, so I spelled them for her and she wrote them. Other than the letters in her own name, I haven't "taught" her to form any letters... she has just started doing it on her own.

We plan to add a little at a time to our Mary Garden. We planted marigold seeds, so we'll see if they come up. I also plan to plant some rosemary, maybe just in a pot, and put it in the garden. We are also going to make a garden stone with some sort of Marian theme - I picked up a stone making kit and various blue gemstone things at the craft store. In future years, maybe we will get a statue, and we'll put in other plants traditionally associated with Mary. I have a few ideas for garden decorations that reflect some of Mary's many titles... it will be a fun project to revisit each May.