Fixettwell Farmlet: Building our Bottle Tree

Remember a few months ago when I was lamenting how many obstacles our new garden site had? Back when I was doing wintertime planning of the garden, I was looking for some inspiration for how to deal with our laundry line/dead tree erected in the middle of the space which would become our garden, so I entered a Google image search for “dead tree garden art". After searching through hundreds of images (or maybe it was only 10 but seemed like more due to our veeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyy slooooooooooooooowwww internet connection!), I came across this page on building a bottle tree, and I knew that was what I wanted to make from our dead tree. The runner up was this awesome bicycle-bespectacled tree stump, but our tree was tall & narrow so I'll have to wait for another stump before building one of those!

Beautiful cobalt blue bottle!

When Chris came in from one of his epic battles against invasive vines, I greeted him with “Baby, we've got to go buy some Bud Platinum so we can build a beautiful blue bottle tree!" Chris gave me that blank stare like he hadn't thawed out yet, had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, and/or couldn't hear me through his earmuffs. I excitedly showed him some of the images I'd found, but he still seemed a bit glazed over. “But neither of us likes beer," he eventually pointed out. “We promised we'd throw a housewarming party!" I countered. And so our plan was born!

Once we knew what to look for, googling images matching “bottle tree" yielded a wealth of inspiration. We found this bottle trees website which certainly meets its claim to impart “more than you ever wanted to know about bottle trees," in enormous comic sans font no less! We discussed what each of us liked and didn't like about each of the photos, and then forgot about it until a couple of months later, when it was suddenly time for our party.

To accommodate large amounts of beer & potluck foods at the same time as our many, many pounds of spring greens, we plugged in a 2nd fridge on the side porch and started swapping out all our food with beer so that the regular kitchen fridge would end up holding snacks and drinks that guests could easily access during the party. Somehow this seemed like a good idea at the time; the problem was that we only gave ourselves negative 2 hours to finish the project. After a half-dozen guests showed up at 4pm on the dot (which to be fair was technically when we said the party would start, but by that we really meant 5pm!) -- we quickly shifted into the role of host/ess and abandoned the fridge-switching project midstream, leading to a lot of confusion. Many, many hours and bottles of wine later, Chris remembered the precious blue beer bottles were still buried in the porch fridge! He brought them out and tried to pawn them off on our few remaining late-night guests, but alas by then there weren't too many takers. Thank you to the friends & family who did help us consume this disgusting beverage in the name of garden art!

The week after our party, it was finally time to build the bottle tree. We brought a laptop out to the garden and opened up my personal favorite, MS Paint. I took a photo of our bottle-tree-to-be, then drew in its “branches" so we could figure out some proportions that looked good to us:

Chris really wanted to use sticks so that the branches would be naturally curved, and he set up a small prototype. It was indeed beautiful but they unfortunately weren't very sturdy. Plus, they weren't perfectly round, meaning we'd have to figure out gluing small wedges into the holes to stabilize them somehow. And we'd have to switch drill bits every 10 seconds. We decided to use more uniform materials for this, but as the mood strikes him, Chris will build a series of “bottle bushes" around the property.

I had taken a lap through the old general store and our “skinny tall things in a bucket" collection, and rounded up everything I could find in the approximately 1/4"-3/4" diameter range. This included dowel rods, metal curtain rod pieces, electrical conduit elbows, wooden sticks from oversized lollipops, and who knows what else. We settled on the curtain rods and 1/2" dowels, for consistency's sake.

We decided we wanted a tri-color tree (blue, green, and brown), with about equal representation from each color. But we both agreed the blue was the most beautiful. We had to open some more of the Bud Platinum while we worked on this project in order to have enough bottles! A couple bottles may have “accidentally" tipped over in the grass.

We started with a bright blue Skyy vodka bottle at the very top. We only own one of these bottles--that stuff is too expensive! (Side note: the delicious Skyy ginger vodka did help inspire our foray into infusions! We're pleased that our homemade version tastes even better :-)

Then Chris worked on holding dowels with bottles on them while I sat on the swing and said “A little to the left" and Chris said “Whose left? Do you mean South-by-southeast?" and I said “Ummmm.... Errr...... Well, the sun is over there.... but I don't know what time it is... So I guess that doesn't help." We both got fairly frustrated with each other, but just at that moment, Chris's dad texted us that he was going to fly his plane over our house -- the perfect distraction! Sometimes you just need to take a break.

Slowly, it all came together, one dowel at a time. We thought we might have to add in some wood glue, but it turned out that the dowels/rods wedged into the holes tightly enough on their own. I got to be the “artistic director" saying which color bottle should go where, and which angle it should point at, and Chris was the driller whose execution sometimes improved on my best judgment. Teamwork, makin' the dream work!

The next day, I took lots of photos so I'd remember where everything was and took bottles inside to soak the labels off. Really, I should've done this before we started building, but I didn't. Like I said, we were still trying to drink up the beer during this whole process!

We tried to make our tree look good from any angle, although the primo viewing spot is definitely the porch swing installed at the south end of the garden.