So, rock collecting is a family affair for you, too! How old are your children? Snakes, yikes...the first one would send Carl running for his life, lol, the man just hates snakes and I'd be right behind him! Biscuit Rock is going to be famous someday and written up in magazine articles, for it will be the centerpiece of your show gardens and 'the rock that started it all'! I'm looking forward to your pictures. ;-) Thanks about the gazebo; Carl's niece was getting married and we wanted to add a special touch to the formal garden for wedding photos. We worked like mad to get that thing done. The copper was scrap recycling sheets, and the legs are merely 4" pipe taken out of a department store's fire protection system which laid rusting in a junk pile. (the same one the wrecker came from) We wish we could have afforded something nicer for the legs, but we made do with what we had-like usual! I'm sending some pics: the first one is of the formal garden in 1991, those are our farm rocks and the neighbor's lol...we didn't know what we were doing back then, it was my first attempt at gardening on a what I thought then was a 'grand scale' ha, my plants look really sad..lol. There are two 50 gallon drums in the background: that is where the quarry is now. Then we decided to build the gazebo to put in the formal garden 20+ years later; the trees grew a bit!

It looks like a common garter snake to me. There are several varieties. I hope you didn't kill it as they good snakes. Here is a link to enature.com. They have field guides where you can look up almost enything. I have linked to garter snakes. You may find yours there. Sorry it is long, but I narrowed it down to southest, then common garter snake. there are serveral pictures and one of them looks like yours http://enature.com/fieldguides/detail.asp?source=&parkid=&searchText=garter+snake&allSpecies=y&shapeID=0amp;lshapeID=0amp;curAbbr=&lastView=default&lastGroup=7&lastRegion=&lastFilter=4&lastShapeName=&trackType=&curRegionID=2209&size=&habitat=&fruit=&color=&sortBy=family&curFamilyID=®ionSelect=Southeast®ionZIP=&curGroupID=7&lgfromWhere=&curPageNum=1

It looks like one of the several tree vipers in SE Asia of the genus Trimeresurus. I am not familiar with the differnt species and subspecies. It could be a color variant of T. wagleri (Wagler's Pit Viper or Temple Viper).

Yeah, kidhorn2, WHY? Is it THAT difficult to simply learn something about snakes, and how to ID them? Seriously, I've taught second graders to do that, and we have quite a few venomous species in the Southeast where I live. You aren't exactly making yourself out to seem very intelligent by that statement. Explain to me this logic: if you know for a fact that dogs kill an average of 30 people per year in the US and send another 3 MILLION to the hospital, whereas snakes kill less than 5 people on average per year, why does it make more sense to hate snakes and not dogs? I can look at a snake and tell right away if it's venomous, and therefore potentially dangerous, but even a lifetime growing up around dogs and breeding dogs has not allowed me to be able to glance at a random dog and determine if that dog will bite or attack. I have far more reason to be concerned about a dog, than a snake. Even with a venomous snake, I have tools that allow me to safely pick it up and relocate it. It's easier, believe me, to pick up a large rattler than an angry 30-pound dog, and I've done both.