we've added to our garden this year a
unique work of art in the form of this
bottle tree now bottle trees are very
easy to grow they don't require any
water any pruning they're very hearty
and they give you color pretty much year
round well the Bottle Tree is a great
work of art for the garden and you may
remember early this year we visited the
garden of Felder rushing down in Jackson
Mississippi and Felder has 10 bottle
trees in his garden some are made up of
all blue bottles and they give a lot of
color to his landscape well the Bottle
Tree is a great work of art for the
garden but it has its origins in
southern American folklore or folk
tradition some of the early African
Americans to our country would put these
up in front of their homes in the belief
that if there were any evil spirits that
were trying to get into the home they
would be distracted by the bright
colorful bottles and they would become
trapped inside the bottles and if you've
ever blown on a
bottle and you hear that weird sound
well this was believed to be the spirits
trying to get out of the bottle and that
the only way they could get out would be
if the bottle was was dropped and broken
well I think most people that have
bottle trees in their Gardens today have
them because they just want a unique
work of art or a great architectural
element or sort of an element of Whimsy
in the garden but they do give you quite
a bit of color this bottle tree Was A
Gift To Us by one of our ambassadors
Olan Thomas we want to thank Olan for
the great job he did of putting this
together and it also has special meaning
because Olan solicited our group of
volunteers our ambassador group for
different bottles and we all gave Olan
the different bottles to contribute to
our Bottle Tree but you can see how he
put it together with this eight-sided
wooden post here and he put long nails
at the bottom shorter Nails up at the
top and just started adding the bottles
the larger ones at the bottom and then
all the way up to the top with a really
small colorful glass bottles to have our
very own Oklahoma gardening Bottle Tree
now you could do this at home with a
tree that has upright facing branches or
upright growing branches it'd be a great
way to recycle a Christmas tree a lot of
our Christmas trees are species that
have rot resistant wood so we could take
the tree after Christmas is over just
kind of set it out in the yard for a
while let all the needles fall off of it
and then clean it up a bit prune it a
little bit put the trunk in the ground
maybe cement the trunk into the ground
or cement it into a tub or a bucket that
way you could have your Bottle Tree on
the patio and then just start collecting
colorful glass bottles to create a
Bottle Tree and you too could have an
interesting architectural or art element
in the garden in the form of a Bottle
Tree