By Helen Brooks · Gloucester, Massachusetts

“Every January I watched the birds tap at ice that used to be water. So I built a bird bath that stands through the freeze.”— Why a 73-year-old retired boat carver is closing his workshop and letting his last 28 mermaid bird baths go for $39 with free shipping.

Hand-finished in a harbor workshop and made to stay outdoors all winter. One of the last 28 Art Lindqvist will ever make.

Every morning at six, before the coffee, Art Lindqvist walks down to the bottom of his garden in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with a tin jug of water. He fills the shell, steps back, and waits.

Within a minute, the first one arrives. A song sparrow, most days. Then a pair of chickadees, and after them a cardinal who has been coming for so many years that Art calls him “the Deacon.” They don’t seem to mind being watched. They drink, they splash, and when they leave, the water is still glittering.

“People think a bird bath is a garden ornament,” Art says, rinsing the jug under the garden tap. “It isn’t. In January, it might be the only open water for a mile.”

He is seventy-three, he is closing his workshop at the end of the year, and the mermaid standing in his garden is the last design he will ever put his name to. There are 28 left.

The winter the water froze

The same bird bath in January. Art says the first frost is the best time to start, because birds learn where water is.

It is easy to forget, in a mild November, how hard winter is on small birds. Ponds ice over. Puddles turn to glass. A garden full of seed can still be a place where a bird goes thirsty, because a bird can’t drink a frozen bowl.

Art noticed it the winter his wife June began feeding the birds. The feeders were crowded from dawn. But the old concrete bath by the shed was a block of ice from December to March, and he would watch the birds land on its rim, peck at it, and give up.

“They’d come for the seed and stay for the water that wasn’t there,” he says. “June said, ‘Art, can’t you do something?’ I’d been carving for forty years, and I was embarrassed I hadn’t thought of it sooner.”

What worries him most is the timing. Most people think of birds and water in the heat of summer, when the garden is dry and the effort is obvious. Winter is quieter, and the need is greater. “The first hard freeze is when they need you,” Art says, “and it’s when most people have already packed the garden away.”

Forty years of figureheads

Art in his harbor workshop, where every mermaid is finished by hand before it leaves.

To understand why a retired boat carver built a bird bath, you have to understand where Art learned his trade. He grew up two streets from the harbor in Gloucester, the son of a rigger, and started sweeping shavings in a boatyard at sixteen. By nineteen, they had put a gouge in his hand.

For forty years he carved the figures that sit on the bows of old sailing ships. Eagles, maidens, sea-goddesses, and once, for a schooner restoration, a leaping dolphin the size of a small car. The work taught him two things. The first is that a good figure should look as if it is moving, even when it is standing still. The second is that anything left outside by the sea has to be built to survive it.

Then the yards began to close. Fiberglass replaced wood, and plain bows replaced carved ones. “The last figurehead I carved on commission was for a man who wanted it for his living room,” Art says. “He told me it was a shame nobody does this any more. I said, ‘Well, I do.’ But I understood what he meant.”

When he went home that night, the garden was waiting. So was the concrete bird bath, which June had asked him to fix three winters running.

The bath that split

It cracked straight across in the second January frost. Art stood in the garden in his coat, looking at the two halves in the snow, and decided he would build one that wouldn’t.

He did what he knew how to do. He drew a figure. A kneeling mermaid, because he had spent four decades carving women who looked out to sea, and she seemed the right sort of guardian for a bowl of water. Her arms lift a wide, shallow shell above her head. Her tail curls behind her. And the whole figure is made to stand outside through a New England winter.

The first version was too tall. The second was too heavy to move. By the fourth, he had the proportions he wanted: a figure that looks as if she has been in the garden for a hundred years, and a shell shallow enough that a sparrow can stand in it up to its ankles.

“June took one look and said, ‘Well, she’s not going anywhere.’ That was the whole review,” Art says. “She was right. She’s been out there for years now.”

Within a month, the neighbors had noticed. Within a year, he had a waiting list. People who walked past the garden wall wanted to know who made her, and a few of them wanted one for their own gardens. Art made them in the evenings, for friends, one at a time.

Made to stand through winter

The shell and the scales. The finish is meant to soften and age outdoors rather than wear off.

Art will tell you that the secret is not clever. It is care, and a shape that doesn’t fight the weather. Four things matter most:

• “Made for frost.” The figure is designed to stay outside all winter. No bringing it into the garage, no wrapping it, no worrying when the temperature drops.
• “A shallow shell bowl.” Birds drink and bathe at the edge of shallow water. The wide shell is just deep enough for finches, sparrows and robins, and it is easy to refill.
• “Held up high.” The mermaid lifts the bowl above the ground, where birds feel safer from cats and where the water stays cleaner than a dish on the grass.
• “A finish that ages well.” The dark, bronze-toned body and the blue-green scales soften outdoors. She looks right in a rose bed, beside a stone wall, or at the end of a path.

Where you put her matters almost as much as what she is made of. Art’s advice is simple: place her within a few steps of a shrub or a hedge, so the birds have somewhere to dart to if a hawk goes over. Keep the shell topped up with fresh water, and rinse it every few days with a splash and a brush. In freezing weather, check it in the morning and break up any skin of ice.

“And don’t expect them on day one,” he says. “Give it a week. They’re cautious. Once the first one trusts the water, the rest follow.”

Before his coffee goes cold

Six a.m. in the garden. Art refills the shell, and the Deacon waits on the mermaid’s tail.

Art isn’t sentimental about birds. “I like them because they’re honest,” he says. “They show up when there’s water and they don’t when there isn’t.”

But watch him at six in the morning and you will see a different man. He rinses the shell before he refills it. He keeps a small brush in his coat pocket. He talks quietly to the Deacon, who sits on the mermaid’s tail and waits for his turn. By the time Art has made his coffee, there are usually five or six birds in the garden, and the shell is a small, busy pool.

“It takes me two minutes,” he says. “And it’s the best two minutes of my day.”

It is also the part of the work that no factory copies. A figure can be reproduced. A morning habit can’t. People who buy one, Art has noticed, often write to tell him the same thing: it has changed the way they begin the day.

What to expect in the first week

Art gets a surprising number of letters from people who put the mermaid out and were disappointed on day one. He writes back the same thing every time: be patient. Birds are wary of anything new in the garden, and a new bird bath is a new thing.

On the first day, expect nothing, or a single bold sparrow that takes one look and leaves. By the third day, the regulars will have noticed it from their perch on the fence. By the end of the first week, most people see the first real bath: a bird that sits in the shell, fluffs its feathers, and sprays half the water over the rim.

Art’s tip is to keep the water fresh and the surroundings quiet. “Don’t stand over it with a camera,” he says. “Sit inside with a cup of tea and watch through the window. Let them decide it’s safe.”

Once that happens, the visits tend to multiply. People write to say they have counted a dozen species in a season: finches, sparrows, robins, chickadees, the occasional thrush, and once, in a letter Art keeps pinned above his bench, a wren that came every afternoon at four.

A gift that makes people go quiet

Something Art didn’t expect is how many of the mermaids are bought for someone else. A son ordered one for his mother’s eightieth birthday. A woman in Vermont sent one to a friend who had just moved into her first home alone. A grandfather in Ohio bought one for a garden he and his granddaughter had planted together.

“It’s a gift that says, ‘I thought about you,’” Art says. “It isn’t a gift card, and it isn’t a candle that smells nice for a week. It stands in their garden every day and gives them something to look at when they pour their coffee.”

“It was my shoulders that said stop”

The last row. Twenty-eight mermaids left, waiting for gardens.

A figure like this has to be lifted, turned and finished by hand more than once before it is ready to go outside. For years, Art did it without thinking. This spring, he noticed that he was thinking about it every time.

“I’m seventy-three,” he says. “My shoulders don’t take it the way they used to. I could keep going somewhere smaller, but I’d rather stop while I’m still proud of the work than make something I wouldn’t put in my own garden.”

There is another reason. The yard that rents him his workshop has been sold, and the lease ends this December. He has decided not to look for another. There is no apprentice, either. The yards that once trained carvers have closed one by one. “Nobody’s coming up behind me, and I don’t say that to be sad,” he says. “It’s just how it is.”

What he has left is 28 mermaids. When they are gone, there will be no second batch, because there will be no workshop to make it in.

“I’d rather they stand in gardens than in my shop”

Sparrows at the shell in late summer. Art says that most of his customers write to him about the first bird.

Art has priced the last pieces low on purpose. A figure like this, made by hand, would normally cost far more, and he knows it. His granddaughter has told him so more than once.

“I’m not trying to get rich,” he says. “I have my pension and I have the house. I want these standing in gardens by the spring thaw, with birds on them. If one ends up on a collector’s shelf, I’ve failed.”

He is letting the last 28 go for $39 each, with free shipping, until they’re gone. Each one comes with a 30-day return guarantee: if it doesn’t suit your garden, send it back and you get your money back, no questions asked.

“The finches found it in one day.” — What gardeners say about Art’s bird bath

• ★★★★★

  “I put it out in October. By the first week of November I had finches, a robin and a very bold squirrel. It looks so elegant by my roses.”

  Barbara T., Hartford, CT
• ★★★★★

  “I bought it for my wife’s birthday. She loves it. It looks like a piece of garden sculpture, not something from a catalog.”

  Mark D., Asheville, NC
• ★★★★★

  “We get hard frost here and I was worried. It has been out for weeks with no trouble. The birds came within a day.”

  Joan K., Burlington, VT

Before you order: the questions people ask Art most

Where can I buy one?

Only here, through this page. Art doesn’t sell through marketplaces, garden centers or other stores.

How long will they be available?

While stock lasts. There were 28 when this article was published, and there will be no second batch.

Do I need to bring it inside for winter?

No. It is made to stay outside through frost. Just keep the shell topped up with fresh water.

What if it doesn’t suit my garden?

Send it back within 30 days and get your money back. Art would rather it went to someone who will love it.

Are cheaper copies the same?

They may look similar in a photo. The difference is in the shape, the finish and the care, and Art checks every one by hand before it ships.

Is it a good gift?

It is the gift people mention most often. A bird bath doesn’t go out of date, doesn’t need batteries, and makes a quiet garden feel alive.

More from the gardens they ended up in

• ★★★★★

  “A conversation piece. Every guest asks about her. I’m glad I didn’t wait.”

  Carol S., Savannah, GA
• ★★★★★

  “Heavier and better finished than the photos suggest. The birds were on it within the week.”

  Peter L., Portland, ME
• ★★★★★

  “I filled it on a freezing morning and was surprised how quickly the chickadees found it. A lovely thing.”

  Nancy W., Madison, WI

Advertisement. Results may vary. Colors and details may differ slightly from the photos. This is the final series, and the offer applies while stock lasts.