The Year My Garden Ornaments Grew Heavier Than Me

It started with one ugly birdbath

I did not set out to make anything. The first thing I ever cast was a birdbath, and it was genuinely ugly. My mother had died in the spring, and I could not sleep, and one night I found a bag of quick-set concrete in the shed that my late husband had bought years earlier for a job he never finished. I mixed some in an old washing-up bowl at two in the morning, pressed a dinner plate into the middle to make a dish shape, and left it on the back step. In the morning it had set into a lopsided grey saucer with my thumbprints all over the rim. I put it on a tree stump, filled it with water, and by lunchtime a pair of sparrows were fighting over it.

That was the whole beginning. I am not a sculptor. I was a school administrator for thirty-one years, the person who kept the register straight and the fire drill on time. But there was something about pouring a soft grey slurry into a shape and coming back to find it had become a solid, permanent thing that steadied me during a year when nothing else felt solid at all.

From saucers to slabs

By the end of that first summer I had made maybe a dozen pieces. Little planters. A second birdbath, less ugly. A squat pot I was almost proud of. Neighbours started asking. A woman two doors down offered me money for the good birdbath, and I was so surprised I nearly said no. Then I said yes, and I spent the whole amount on more concrete and a set of proper rubber moulds, and that, looking back, was the moment the hobby quietly decided to become something else without asking my permission.

The trouble with concrete is honest and simple. It is heavy. A small planter you can carry on your hip like a toddler. But the pieces people actually wanted to buy were the big ones. The urn that stands as tall as your knee. The trough long enough for a row of lavender. The classical-looking pedestal that a birdbath bowl sits on top of. Those pieces do not care about your feelings or your back. A single large trough, once cured, weighed more than I did, and I am not a small woman.

For a long time I managed the way stubborn people manage. I used a sack barrow. I used planks as ramps. I roped in my son when he visited and felt guilty every time. I once spent forty minutes inching a pedestal across the yard using two lengths of old scaffold pipe as rollers, the way I had read the pyramids were built, and I felt terribly clever right up until the thing tipped and took a chunk out of my shin.

The morning I could not get up off the floor

The reckoning came on an ordinary Tuesday. I had a customer coming to collect three large planters, and I wanted them lined up neatly by the gate rather than scattered round the yard where I cast them. I bent, I lifted the first one the way you are told never to lift, and something in my lower back went with a sound I felt more than heard.

I ended up on the concrete floor of my own workshop, on my side, looking at the underneath of a workbench, unable to get up for the better part of an hour. My phone was in the house. Nobody was coming. I lay there and did the sums I had been avoiding for two years. I was sixty-one. The pieces were only getting bigger because the bigger ones were the ones that sold. And I was trying to move a grown adult's worth of solid stone across a yard using nothing but my own spine and a wheelbarrow that was never designed for it.

When I finally got upright, shuffled inside, and lowered myself into a kitchen chair with a bag of frozen peas behind me, I understood something that should have been obvious years earlier. The bottleneck in my little business was not the pouring. It was not the moulds or the curing or even the money. It was the lifting. I had built the whole thing on the assumption that my body would keep quietly doing the impossible, and my body had just handed in its notice.

Asking a question I did not know how to ask

I am from a generation and a temperament that does not naturally reach for machinery. My instinct was to make the pieces smaller, or make fewer of them, or simply stop. But I did not want to stop. The workshop was the one place the grief had let go of me, and I was not ready to hand it back.

My son, who is more practical than sentimental, listened to all this and said one sentence that reframed everything. He said, "Mum, you are not a strong enough person to move these things. So stop trying to be a person. Get a machine that is."

I did not even know what I was looking for. I thought forklifts were enormous warehouse things driven by men in high-visibility jackets, not something a woman with forty planters and a bad back could ever have any business with. It turned out there is a whole world of smaller, tougher machines built for exactly the kind of awkward, heavy, outdoor lifting I had been doing by hand. My son sat me down at the kitchen table with a laptop, and we spent an evening reading through a dealer called Delta Heavy Equipment at www.deltahe.com, me asking questions I felt too old and too small to be asking, him patiently explaining what a load capacity actually meant in practice.

Renting before I dared to commit

I was not about to buy anything. The idea of committing that kind of money to a hobby that had ambushed me into becoming a business felt reckless. What I did instead, on advice, was look into Forklift rentals so I could find out whether a machine would even work in my particular yard, with its slope down to the workshop and its gate that has never been quite wide enough for anything.

The first day the rental machine arrived, I stood in my own driveway and felt faintly ridiculous. Then I used it to lift a trough that had defeated three grown people the previous month, and I set that trough down exactly where I wanted it, gently, without a single grunt or a single twinge, and I actually laughed out loud in an empty yard. Two years of straining and improvising and hurting myself, and the answer had been sitting on a website the whole time, waiting for me to be humble enough to look.

I kept the machine on hire for a fortnight, then again the following month for a big order. Renting taught me things buying never could have. It taught me how much I actually moved in a normal week, where the machine could and could not fit, and how quickly I got comfortable operating it once the fear wore off.

What I understand now that I did not before

By the end of the season the rented machine had become so woven into how I worked that I finally sat down and did the honest arithmetic on owning one. I went back and read through their forklifts for sale the way you might read a recipe you have decided you are finally going to attempt, no longer as a fantasy but as a real decision with real numbers attached. I have not made up my mind yet. Owning is a bigger step than renting, and I am content, for now, to hire when the orders are large and manage the small pieces myself.

But the thing I keep coming back to has almost nothing to do with machinery. For most of my life I treated needing help as a kind of failure. I was the woman who did the fire drill herself and never asked anyone to lift the boxes. Lying on that workshop floor, staring at the underside of a bench I had built with my own hands, forced me to admit that some weights are simply not mine to carry alone, and that refusing the right tool is not strength. It is just pride wearing strength's coat.

The ugly first birdbath is still on its tree stump. The sparrows still fight over it. I never sold it and I never will. But now, when I make a trough so heavy it would once have frightened me, I do not brace and heave and hope. I use the right thing for the job, I set the piece down softly, and I get to keep doing the work that saved me, for years longer than my back alone would ever have allowed.