In 2004, while tending to weeds on her family’s farm in Alberta, Canada, Mary Grams lost her engagement ring, resigning herself to the belief that it was gone for good.
Despite days of searching, Mary’s efforts to find her ring proved futile. Then, in 2017, nearly 13 years after its disappearance, her daughter-in-law unearthed a peculiar-looking carrot from the garden. Much to their surprise, the carrot was adorned with some unusual accessories of its own. Wrapped tightly around the large orange root was none other than Mary’s diamond ring!
“I went to the garden for something and I saw this long weed. For some reason, I picked it up and it must have caught on something and pulled [the ring] off,” Mary Grams recalls about the day she lost her engagement ring in 2004. She had worn this ring on her finger since 1951, a year before she married her husband, Norman. “We looked high and low on our hands and knees. We couldn’t find it. I thought for sure either they… it or something happened to it.”
At that time, Mary chose not to inform her husband about the lost ring. In order to spare his feelings, she decided to purchase herself a similar-looking ring and hoped he wouldn’t notice it was missing.
“I didn’t tell him, even, because I thought for sure he’d give me heck or something,” Mary told CBC Canada.
At one point, Mary and her family moved away to Camrose, but they still maintained the garden at the old farm near Armena, which had been in their family for over 105 years.
“I knew it had to belong to either grandma or my mother-in-law because no other women have lived on that farm,” Colleen Daley told reporters. “I asked my husband if he recognized the ring. And he said yeah. His mother had lost her engagement ring years ago in the garden and never found it again. And it turned up on this carrot.”
Daley added, “If you look at it, it grew perfectly around the ring. It was pretty weird looking. I’ve never seen anything like that. It was quite interesting.”
Obviously, Mary was thrilled to have her engagement ring once again. She shared that she intends to keep it on her finger where it belongs.
She said, “I’m going to wear it because it still fits.”
Sadly, Mary’s husband passed away over five years ago, not long after the two celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.
