Back in October of 2010 Charlene and I went down to the lower Mission District in San Francisco to visit the house where her grandmother lived. We got there, and the current owner had just pulled up a Lemon Verbena bush that had been there for many decades, and because of some conversation involving us being interested in woodworking, Charlene got the main branch.
It's been banging around for a while while we tried to figure out what to do with it, and eventually we decided on book ends. I helped a little, this is mostly Charlene's baby. Cut some steel plates that we screwed on the bottom, sanded the living daylights out of the branch, applied finish:
