Pot Running

Pot Running

We lead an exciting life here on the hilltop. Yes, I have a supply of CBD gummies to help with sleep (though I have only tried them once and felt nothing). I also have some CBD /THC salve for my back that was given to me by my friend Rob from Colorado (I only tried that once as well…and never inhaled). But none of that makes me uninterested in pot acquisition at every opportunity. But as you have probably surmised from my turn of phrase, My form of pot running has nothing to do with marijuana. This is a Garden Club thing and for people like us with an overwhelming desire to continuously upgrade our gardens with something new, the easiest way to do that is to buy a few new colorful pots.

We inherited our very largest pots with the house when we bought it. There is one HUGE terracotta pot in the front garden to the right of the driveway that must be six feet tall and perhaps five feet in diameter. It makes a very bold entrance statement when you drive up our driveway. I have tried to find where they sell that size terracotta and how much one like that costs, but have been unsuccessful since it is produced near Siena in Italy and must be shipped over at great cost. In addition to that one huge pot, we also got a series of 5 foot tall glazed pots that we have clustered by the kitchen door with various types of bamboo sticks and such sticking out of them. One of those pots recently got blown over during a high wind storm and best I can tell, it might cost up to $1,000 to replace it.

Last Spring, a subset of us (mostly Faraj, Yasuko and Melisa) took a side-trip to a place called Planter Paradise. The place does sell some nursery products and plants, but mostly it is THE place to go for pots of all sizes at good , dare I say discount, prices. We made two sorties to the place and collectively bought about 15-20 pots of varying sizes. Since then I have perhaps bought 5 or 6 pots at the local nursery at considerably higher price points than offered at Planter Paradise. The place is about an hour south of here, so it takes a dedicated pot run to access that superior pricing and selection. All of us have pent up pot demand at this point, so we have decided to make another run for pots this week. I need to review all my pot needs, but I am sure I need two new pots for the driveway entrance. I had some nice red pots, but Kim crunched on those and I was unable to replace them with the local pot offerings. Instead, I used a few green pots that don’t stand out very well (which is the whole point at the driveway entrance) and are too small for the purpose. Kim will be with me, and I know how much variety exists at Planter Paradise, so choosing the size, shape and color of entry pots will be our first decision. We will also need to consider whether there are any tall decorative pots that could replace the one at our side entry that got broken. The key factor on that one will be the cost and how much we feel the need to replicate what we had (which we know we got gratis with the purchase of the house).

By my most recent count, I have about 100 ceramic pots around the garden, all of various shapes and sizes. About 20 of them are shallow and small bonsai pots, but there are probably 30 other pots that are quite large and imposing. I have tended to favor cobalt blue ceramic pots, which I have spread all over the property. It feels a bit like a theme color that ties all the various gardens together. The second most common color is caliente red to match our large shade sail and front door. I don’t want to prejudge the colors we will get this trip, but I tend to believe that red and blue are the most likely colors. Yellow stands out too much and green blends in too much. We’ll see what spirit moves us and where the best value opportunities are.

I have a long connection to terracotta pots that goes back to my youth. When we lived in Costa Rica from 1959 – 1960, we would have local guys come by the house selling pre-Colombian pottery that they had dug up at some burial mound or other that are scattered all over that country. The ancient indigenous people were Mesoamerican, but less Mayan or Aztec from the north and more Incan from the south. I guess the Darien Gap was less a barrier to indigenous people than it is to us today. These indigenous people were into burying their dead with artifacts from their lives, presumably like ancient Egyptians, in order to give them the utensils they needed in the afterlife. The most common things buried with them were decorative clay pottery and pumice statuary. We acquired both during our stay in Costa Rica because, at the time, there were no laws forbidding the ownership and/or export of such antiquities. In fact, I got interested enough in archeology that my mother allowed me to go on several digs to local burial sites where I actually participated in digging up some pottery that I still have today.

This interest in archeology stayed with me and when we moved to Rome in 1968 and before I had any local friends, someone directed me to a place called Testaccio Hill in the center of an old Roman neighborhood that bounds the Tiber River near what is called Piramide Cestia. It was there that the ancient commercial shipping activity of the city was centered. Since the time of the Phoenicians, cargoes of grains and liquids were transported in terracotta clay casks known as amphorae. I guess you could say that these traders were all about pot running. These amphorae were basically just clay pots that stood about 5 feet tall and were narrowed to a point at the bottom. Obviously, they were not intended to stand upright, but rather were designed to lay flat and conform to the shape of the ship’s hold in which they were transported. These amphorae were laced together down below and provided both ballast for the ships plying the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, and they were a convenient way to seal and transport valuable cargo in a way that allowed it to be easily loaded and unloaded (easy for everyone other than the numerous slaves required to do the loading and unloading). It was traditional in Rome, a city-state that prized a higher degree of hygiene than most places of its day, that these amphorae were emptied into presumably better containers that were more suitable for land transport. The standards of the day called for the used amphorae to be discarded and not reused for sanitary purposes. Thus, they began to accumulate in a trash pile by the shore of the Tiber next to the docks of Testaccio.

In the summer of 1968, the Italian cultural powers had not yet closed off Testaccio Hill to amateur archeologists like me, so I spent a day digging up shards on the hill. The valuable pieces were the obvious jar necks and handles as well as any pieces that had imbedded markings of one sort or another. I loges that collection of dusty terracotta around my whole life and it now lives in a glass curio table filled with black sand in my office. I added my Costa Rican pre-Colombian pottery collection as well and thus have my own little indoor pottery display of mementos. I suppose my obsession with ceramic pots for the garden is somehow linked to these shards of antiquity that I dug up those many years ago in my youth. I also imagine that many years from now, someone will unearth my garden pots and hypothesize about the indigenous hilltop Californians that once roamed this land and used pots as currency (why else would one guy own 100+ of the damn things?). So tomorrow we will all go pot running once again.