You never know what you will find when digging through antiques and junk from that attic. Sometimes you find just more junk, but sometimes you can get lucky like Valerie Worthington who innocently started to rearrange a funky looking old silk tree only to discover a stash of vintage jewelry hidden in its base.

From Vintage jewelry found in silk plant:

Valerie Worthington's gardener sensibilities were offended by the unruly appearance of the silk fig tree her boss rescued from the storage warehouse and placed near her desk in the Grand Auction reception area.

Even though the tree wasn't real, she decided Wednesday to tidy up around its base.

She pulled up the ferns, all fake. Pulled up the dried moss, also fake. And there, lying on top of the foam base, she found a black velvet bag. It had the authentic look and feel of riches.

"I immediately thought, 'someone stashed their goodies in there,' " she said.

Worthington ran upstairs to show her boss Dianna Hubert her find. They opened the bag, tipped it onto a desk and out spilled a glittering stash of vintage diamond and pearl jewelry.

"I worked for Birks jewellers for several years," Worthington said. "They all look like authentic pieces."

Included was an art deco ring with delicate silver filigree and sparkling diamonds. A wide gold-cuff bracelet. A three-stone diamond ring. Some lovely mabe pearls, which, for the uninitiated, are large half-spherical pearls grown on the inside shell of a mollusk.

Hubert has not yet had the jewelry appraised. But to her skilled eye, she estimates the value to be anywhere from between $10,000 and $40,000.

She would like to return the jewels, but says she has no way to figure out who the owner might be.

Her North Vancouver auction house has accumulated a lot of silk plants over the years, she said.

From reading the rest of the article it sounds like it might be close to impossible who might have owned the jewelry, but it was nice to read that she is thinking of auctioning it all of for charity.