Garden Totem Surprise Residents

It is 3 months since my initial set up of my garden totem beside my then-bare Davidii involucrata (dove) tree.  Today I finally went out with more of the pieces, most significantly the base piece, to replace the overturned plastic plant pot.

I started removing piece by piece, and was surprised to find the pot and the bottom three pieces completely filled with sandy soil, and a colony of ants.  So I installed the base piece, dumped the soil from the pot into it, and replaced the other 3 pieces in the same sequence, to hopefully restore the poor colony without too much disturbance.  Poor things were frantically running about, and one brave ant had already bitten my hand (he was tiny, so it wasn't much of a bite).

I have changed up the top of the totem a bit, I think it may look a bit better now.

I was glad that the base piece fit nicely.  It looks much better than the plastic flower pot.  The funny duck head on the other side of the tree is a piece of driftwood which I enhanced with a bit of acrylic paint for the beak.  Both the totem and the driftwood duck serve as stoppers or hose guards for my water hose, when I pull it about the yard.

Here's another view of it, looking toward my other ceramic pieces in the garden.

I have a couple more pieces which I am still waiting for final glaze firing, so hope to have another small totem in the garden soon.  I have lots of small trees to navigate around with the hose, so I have many locations which would benefit from another hose guard.

Just for fun, I put a few left over pieces in what is left of my poor peach tree, which got very diseased this year, so I cut it down.  I plan to replace it next year.  But for now, at least I get the ceramics off my kitchen counter.  Hopefully I don't have any residents move into them before I assemble them into a totem!