pottery 10 and a season of jade

 It was a little bit like Christmas, walking into the room and looking for our fired pots.
Familiar shapes, with our initials carved on the bottom, but with new surfaces...glossy and smooth, with wonderful variations of color.

Butter dish

5 succulent pots

I purchased cactus and succulent soil from Early's on my way home,
and filled my 5 entertainingly misshapen succulent pots.

Then went to my bag of jade to find pieces that wanted to be planted.
Bag of jade?  you may wonder...
It has been a year of abundant jade.
 
I have one jade plant from a ten year old Solar gardens succulent pot, that has grown from a little plant to a veritable tree.  This winter I decided to prune it back. Hard.  Poor thing.  I took off every branch with a green leaf, and put all of the branches into a bag and left it by the front door - offering jade to anyone who comes into my house.  They sit in the bag, patiently waiting for a new home, or sign of hope.  Some of the branches have sent out little white roots, searching tentatively for soil, for water to help them to extend their lives.  
Wasn't sure if the main trunk would survive, and that was ok because I don't get all that attached to my indoor plants.  And besides, this past summer its pot fell over in a windstorm, breaking off branches which I promptly  stuck into other pots and they ALL just kept growing.    
I seem to be growing a jade forest.  They thrive outside on my deck or the sunny west side of the yard all summer, and then endure my neglect all winter.

But it has survived, and is sprouting life from all of its fingertips!

And another family of jades has joined my forest.

A long time ago a jade tree grew in my living room.  I was just beginning to learn to grow things ... and people.  My daughters were toddlers, my gardens were mostly experiments in how well the weeds could thrive in the midst of my neglect.  My young husband planted a garden big enough for us to live on.  He was - among other things - a gardener, and collector of a wide range of beautiful prickly cacti and succulents.    

When Dan's life was over, his parents took over the care of his beautiful jade, and it has thrived all these 27 years.  It fell over last year.  The main trunk rotted, and they salvaged some of that grand jade's branches and brought them to me.

And so some of my new pottery experiments hold jade.  My pottery class is done.
And the sign at Lakeshore Nurseries assuring us that we'll see them again in April feels more like a reasonable promise than a sign of abandonment.  April is not so very far away.

We have these treasures in jars of clay...