The decision to add a flag to my gardens was difficult for me. Now I have fun with it. I have a master plan to have a flag for each season but never quite keep up. I did get a snowlady flag for winter last year & a green witch for October.

This little bird followed me home from an Arkansas vacation one year.

A gift to Ron from his mom. She's a lot of fun.

Little Red Wagon & Froggie

Ron's Creations - 2006 Learning hypertufa technique

Silver Mound / Frog / brick planter

Good Luck Cricket

Appreciation Gift from Knoxville Federated Garden Club for opening my gardens for a tour just for them.

I never got that "Good Luck Cricket" thing. I find crickets quite aggravating, and smelly, and destructive. I have spent many sleepless hours due to a chirping cricket hidden in the room. I admit, I have murdered a lot of crickets inside the house. Why don't they stay outdoors where they belong?

"Folklore has it that a pet cricket will ward off evil spirits, bring good luck or both. For those who wish to test this possibility, crickets are easy to keep in captivity. Put a layer of sand in a fruit jar, add a small bottle cap for water, a cricket, and cover the jar opening with mosquito netting. Feed bits of lettuce, dry oatmeal, melon or chicken bone and your cricket should be happy. Perhaps you will be, too."

--JIM HALE is a biologist, former researcher and was the first director of DNR's Endangered Resources program.

Cricket Superstitions

A cricket on the hearth has been a sign of household luck for thousands of years. And the idea is prevalent in every corner of the world. Possibly the belief stems from prehistoric times, when a cricket's chirping provided a kind of companionship. The cricket has also served as a watchdog in China and other Asian countries for generations. At any sign of danger, the chirping will stop. Almost every Native American tribe believed in the cricket as a bringer of luck, and they regarded imitating the sound a cricket makes as disrespectful. In the Far East as well as across Europe, it is considered very bad luck to kill a cricket, even by accident. Images of crickets appear on charms and amulets, particularly those intended to ward off the evil eye, in most ancient cultures of the Middle East and Europe. One of the best-known in America is the large weather vane on Boston's Fanuel Hall, a copper cricket fashioned by our Colonial forefathers to protect the building.

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