Yard Art

Spring brings out the time to do the early yard clean up. Now that the debris that’s accumulated over the winter is no longer covered either by leaves or snow, and people are actually walking down the street and can see the place without looking through slush-splattered car windows, the neighborhood norms dictate that we take some kind of action.

When you’re doing that kind of cleanup is when you really get a look at how others see your yard. That leads some of us to the conclusion that there’s a fine line between “yard art” and “just plain trashy.”

I keep working on that balance here. Although I’ve accepted that it’s not physically possible to fit another plant or shrub into the yard anywhere, my mind keeps going back to the fact that there’s still a couple of locations that could stand a bit of ornamentation.

Right now, other than the fish pond and it’s waterfall that gets revised on a fairly regular basis – usually after critters have knocked enough of the rocks into the pond that reconstruction is unavoidable -- the only structural elements are a couple of bottle trees.

For those not in the know, bottle trees are a fine southern tradition that date back to colonial days, probably from slaves. The idea was that you hang brightly colored bottles out and evil spirits are enticed to move in to these spiffy new cribs. You then sneak up on them, cap the bottles to trap the spirits and then throw them in the river so they float downstream and annoy the neighbors.

Nowadays most of us choose to keep the bottles attached to the trees, throwing stuff in the river being politically incorrect and all. Besides, if the spirits keep the noise down and mind their own business, they qualify as good neighbors.

I built the first one of these a few years ago. We started saving wine bottles over several months and I began scrounging materials out of the basement. I didn’t want the freeform tree that’s most common, but instead wanted something that looks kind of like a cartoon Christmas tree – nice straight lines and lots of bottles.

It takes more bottles than you’d think to fill up the space. We had to up our “wine-of-the-month” subscription for a while. We also had to think creatively to find some colorful bottles – wine, for the most part, tends to come in green, brown or clear which is functional but kind of dull. Bright blue takes either vodka or tequila, not usually on our drink list. We also learned that any wine that comes in other colored bottles – pink, for example – is to be purchased solely for the purpose of acquiring the bottle. The wine is almost invariably so bad as to be unfit even for cooking.

So the big bottle tree dominates one part of the yard, hidden by foliage during the growing season and then emerging during the barren months. One unfortunate side effect is that it looks something like a Christmas decoration, giving the impression that I’m too lazy to bring it in and just leave the tree up year round.

This isn’t an unfair assumption, it’s just incorrect. If there were lights up on the eaves of the house, given my aversion to ladders and heights, they would undoubtedly stay up most of the year.
 

About mid-winter last year, a friend brought me another bottle tree, this one much more free-form and made of metal. It’s in a shady part of the yard that’s always looked somewhat forlorn in my opinion, unable to grow much of anything because of the oak tree that poisons the soil under it. It needs a bit more decorating, though, to brighten it up and may even need some lights before it’s finished.

That’s the quota for bottle decoration, though, in a yard this size. You reach a point where more is too much, and I don’t want a yard that looks like a recycling center.

I guess that also means that the bottles in the basement are going to have to find another home.

Of course, since gnomes, deer and cutouts of large people’s bottoms bent over and showing their drawers have been banned anything else is going to have to get kind of creative.