|
|
By Hilda, on December 6th, 2010
I shot this photo a couple of years ago while I was taking a little road jaunt with my friend Connie, somewhere up near Adairsville, Georgia. It’s funny, sometimes when I mention bottle trees in a conversation, people don’t know what I’m talking about – so maybe this is your first one too, and I’m glad I could introduce you.
I think of bottle trees as a Southern tradition in yard art, mainly because I never saw a single one before I moved to Georgia. They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and some of them are truly creative. I’ve always been a bit enamored with cobalt blue glass myself, and I save all the blue bottles that come into my house, though I tend to perch them on a windowsill and not out in the yard. Maybe someday I’ll have a bottle tree of my own…
(As a side note, my neighbor Kathy once hung an old wine rack on the fence between our properties and stocked it with cobalt blue bottles. It made a beautiful ornament, and it stayed there till it fell apart a few years ago. I deeply regret not having photographed it.)
I’m not an expert on the history of bottle trees, but I’ve always heard they came to the Southeast from Africa, a by-product of the slave trade. The belief was that marauding spirits would get trapped in the glass bottles overnight, and then be vaporized by the sunlight before they could cause any mischief. Think of the genie trapped in Aladdin’s lamp – it’s all part of the same folklore, going back many centuries to Arabia and the Middle East.
One of my favorite garden writers, Felder Rushing, has researched bottle tree history thoroughly, and you can read all about it on his website. He also has a bottle tree gallery that contains over a hundred photos, which he’s taken on four different continents. It’s highly recommended, very entertaining, and you don’t want to miss it – you’ll be amazed at the wacky, arboreal things people have done with bottles, and the link will open in a new window, for your viewing pleasure.
Back in 2006, the famed glassmakers on the Venetian island of Murano put together the world’s largest glass Christmas tree. Reportedly, the sections were all blown individually, then bolted together. It sat in the town’s Campo Santo Stefano through the holiday season that year, and is now in the Murano Glass Museum. The pictures are just beautiful – and it looks very much like a Southern bottle tree to me, although on a grander scale.
“Planting” Tip:
If you’re inspired to build your own bottle tree, you’ll be glad to know that you don’t have to fabricate a metal base on your own. You can order the “tree” itself from any of the sites below, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Then, just add bottles!
By Hilda, on November 25th, 2010
Things turned out pretty well for the settlers at the Plymouth colony. Every year we acknowledge, through our Thanksgiving celebration, the Pilgrim’s agricultural successes. It’s practically legend, the way they learned from friendly natives which indigenous plants could be gathered for food, and how to grow New World crops like maize, beans, and squash.
 jimson weed (Photo: MissouriPlants.com) Then there was the ill-fated Jamestown settlement. Colonists there also had much to learn about the native flora – and they left behind a very different kind of legacy. What we remember today is mainly their misadventures with Datura stramonium, a shrubby, flowering plant that we know now as jimson weed (shortened from “Jamestown weed”). Reportedly, those who ingested the notorious weed “went mad” for several days, due to the hallucinogenic properties of the plant.
Flash forward to the modern, gardening world — and many of the ornamental plants we currently know as angel’s trumpets belong in the Datura genus, and are closely related to the devilish jimson weed.
From its divine scent to its startlingly large, coronet-shaped blooms, angel’s trumpet is an aptly named flower. A single plant can put on quite a show, easily reaching 10 feet in one growing season. Flowers tend to close during the hottest parts of the day and open in the evening. At twilight, fragrance is at its most intense, as the plants seek to seduce lunar moths and other nocturnal pollinators.
 Angel's trumpet comes in many shapes and colors, including ruffly double forms not seen here.
Though tree-like in form, angel’s trumpet is actually an herbaceous perennial in warm climates (zones 7-10), and it’s grown as annual further north. Here in my Atlanta neighborhood, angel’s trumpet is still blooming like crazy at Thanksgiving time, as we haven’t had a frost yet.
But let the gardener beware:
The Jamestown stories are more than myth. Today, Datura’s effects on the central nervous system are well known. All parts of the plant are toxic, containing the alkaloids atropine, hyocymine, and scopolamine. Ingesting the seeds can cause delirium and disorientation, even hallucinations that have sometimes resulted in harmfully reckless behavior.
 Gardeners should also know that the plant’s sap contains large amounts of atropine, the substance used by ophthalmologists to dilate the pupil during eye exams. There are numerous reports of people who have rubbed their eyes after working with angel’s trumpet and have suffered from dilated pupils for days. Since you can also absorb the alkaloids through an abrasion, it’s best to wear gloves and wash your hands frequently if you’re cultivating angel’s trumpet.
X
X
Want to collect Datura seeds for next year’s garden? It’s easy to harvest them from the pods – just be sure to label and store them safely. In 1983, according to a CDC report, a couple lapsed into a coma just after phoning for an ambulance. Upon their awakening, this is what doctors learned: While making dinner, the wife had added a seasoning to the hamburger, but later realized it was Datura seeds she’d saved from her garden. She scraped most of the seeds off the meat and served the meal. Shortly thereafter, the couple began hallucinating and passed out. They were hospitalized for three days.
The genus Brugmansia, once lumped in with Datura, is also made up of plants known as angel’s trumpets. The easiest way to tell them apart? For the most part, Brugmansia has dangling, pendulous blooms, like these, while Datura sports trumpets that are a bit more upright. They are equally toxic.
By Hilda, on August 8th, 2010
If you’ve ever doubted that gardeners are the most innovative people under the sun, just look at the photos below. . .
I took this shot at the home of Atlanta landscape designer Paula Refi — that’s the side of her garage you’re looking at! A salvaged mantel piece was painted, outfitted with mirrors, and bolted to the outside wall. A stone “hearth” completes the illusion.
This next idea is also clever:
I’ve actually seen this chair-as-planter idea before, and once I even successfully duplicated the look at home.
Here’s how I did it: I paid a few dollars at the flea market for an old wooden chair that was missing its caned seat. Then I stapled black landscape fabric to the underside, to form a shallow planting area — I used the porous kind that’s meant to allow water to run through while it suppresses weeds. I filled it with a lightweight potting soil, added shade loving plants like ferns and impatiens, and placed my chair-planter on my front porch… until I got tired of keeping my creation watered during the hot Atlanta summer.
By Hilda, on July 6th, 2010
Whenever there’s any kind of discussion about heirloom varieties of plants, I immediately think of Thomas Jefferson, so I wanted to pass along this NY Times article. It chronicles how the staff at Monticello today maintain the gardens as authentically as is practical, drawing heavily from Jefferson’s own exhaustive records — between 1726 and 1824, he kept meticulous journals documenting when each seed was sown, and how it fared.
 The vegetable garden at Monticello, Charlottesville, Va. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
According to the article, our third president was not only a prolific but an innovative gardener who took full advantage of various micro-climates on his estate:
After he left the White House in 1809 and moved to Monticello, his Palladian estate here, Jefferson grew 170 varieties of fruits and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs, until his death in 1826.
The intense heat and humidity of a Virginia summer explain why colonial gardens were planted only in spring and toward the end of summer, when temperatures cooled. But Jefferson gardened year-round, planting early in heat-collecting beds along the mountain slope and growing heat-loving crops like okra, melons and tomatoes during the scorching summers. He also grew cool-season lettuces long past their time in the low-lying, damper areas farther down the mountain.
Monticello also houses the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, a program that collects, maintains and sells a wide selection of heirloom plants, especially those grown by Jefferson or discovered and developed in his lifetime. Some of the veggies being grown today in Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden at the White House come from seeds that originated at Monticello.
Planting Tip:
Growing Heirloom Tomatoes in Dry Climates
For all you California and Western gardeners out there, the L.A. Times home & garden blog has a great piece about heirloom tomatoes. It touches on the fact that heirloom varieties come true from seed, unlike modern hybrids, and offers tips for separating the seeds from the fruit to save them.
|
About
The Author
Hilda Brucker
 Hilda combines her
love of gardening
and passion for writing
in her blog entries.
|
