Found Art Nouveau Edging


The old fruit bush area is putting up quite a fight. 4 hours or so of serious spadework, (the grunting, cursing kind), and I've done maybe 1/3 of it. On Sunday, digging down I found a bit of edging, which turned out to be 8ins in width, about 10ft in length. It's difficult to get at because of the path-edge effect, roots from the nettles, cherry trees and fruit bushes have naturally made their home next to, under, and over it. But still it would have been not too bad, but for the fact that the last three foot, there was another metal enamel sheet of... something, just a few inches behind it, and thick root from the cherry tree, (thick as a child's wrist) with a sucker growing out of it, between the two.

This made for a difficult excavation, but I got there with an increased amount of grunting, a pruning saw on the tree root, and more cursing. The 10ft strip will come in handy for edging elsewhere. The mysterious metal enamel you can see in the photo, about a yard long and 10ins high. I gave it a quick wash, but it wants a better one. I assume it's contemporaneous with the Camp Coffee "EXTRACT" sign I pulled up a couple of weeks ago, also serving as edging for a bed. The latest find looks like the top or bottom of a larger sign. The flowery pattern suggests art nouveau, so the sign itself is probably very early 20th Century. But when it became unwanted enough to be used as path edging is anyone's guess: anytime from the 1920s onwards?  Another 15ft or so to go along edge of this bed, be nice to find more like this. Look nice on the side of a shed or cabin, one day.

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