Sculptures add focal points
Art can be moved to fill in bare spots as the growing season evolves
If your garden is missing something, perhaps it’s height. While it’s too late to plant delphiniums or hollyhocks, you can achieve vertical interest with a garden tower.
They’re easy enough to make. And sculptural pieces also draw the eye.
“When planting drifts of annuals and perennials, a sculpture can create an exciting focal point that the plantings accent and enhance,” says interior and garden designer Kathryn Boylston of Evergreen, Colorado.
Sculpture often can be moved to fill in bare spots as the growing season evolves.
To make a garden tower, Boylston recommends thinking tall — at least 1 metre high.
She makes and sells totems out of colourful ceramic pieces that she learned to make in a ceramics class. She offers several different heights at Sundance by Design, the garden-art store she manages in Evergreen. (sundancegardens.com/sundance-by-design.html)
She builds the pieces at home — rolling and cutting out sections on her kitchen counter — and fires them at a studio. The shapes include a blue bird, brown nest, periwinkle flowers and many others stacked on a reinforced steel bar that can be stuck into the ground, a planter or a heavy base. The pieces are glazed and fired at high temperature so they’ll withstand the outdoors.
“You can do this at home,” Boylston says. “It’s all handbuilding.” She does recommend taking a beginning ceramics class, however, to learn the hand-building basics and to gain access to a professional, high-heat kiln.
Want that garden feature faster? Here are two options:
Karen Heath of Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, recycles antique glass lamps into tall garden towers. She threads the mismatched globes, which are outdated for many homes, onto rebar to make works of light-catching art. You can find old lamps at thrift stores and garage sales.
“It adds colour to your garden” and beauty, Heath says. “You don’t have to grow it and you don’t have to tend it.”
Hunting for old lamps to take apart and reassemble is part of the fun, Heath says. Her towers take three to six lamp globes (with their accompanying, showy metal parts) threaded onto one- or threemetre rebar. She shares the do-it-yourself instructions at her blog, Somewhat Quirky Design. (somewhatquirkydesign.com/2014/07/how-to-build-glass-globe-totem.html)
Jennifer Pierquet of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, knew she could craft the glass garden blooms she saw in a high-end garden shop a few years ago. She now sells them from her Etsy shop, Glass Blooms (glassblooms.etsy.com).
Pierquet makes her garden sculptures by repurposing glass and ceramic plates, glassware and other found objects. She co-ordinates the pieces by pattern, size or colour, and adds pops of colour with outdoor acrylic paint (she buys Pebeo online). Individual plates and saucers are glued together with waterproof, silicone-based caulk available at homeimprovement stores. (Pierquet likes the GE Silicone II brand).
Painting the pieces is a fun way to get kids involved, says the mother of two. The kid-painted blossoms make memorable teacher gifts, she says, warning that the outdoor paint won’t wash out of clothing.
Pierquet recommends thinking about how the pieces will look from the front, especially where glue may show through clear glass. She hides those spots by adding flat marbles, old buttons or plastic jewelry that she finds at thrift stores.
The back of the bloom must be flat, she says, so it can be fitted with a piece to hold the rebar. Many crafters, she says, attach a small glass vase for that purpose. She prefers a rubber hockey puck drilled with a hole large enough to insert rebar.
For all three projects, use galvanized, ridged rebar to prevent rusting and for sturdy anchoring.