Written by J. Mitchell Brown

f you have been regularly following my articles in The Breeze, I am quite sure that you have figured out that I am not known for my sense of fine art appreciation. Mine is more of a “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” type of thing. My garden, while being my most treasured retreat from the hustle-bustle of everyday life, looks more like something from Sandford & Sons than any Roman horticultural masterpiece. More often than not, I am sure visitors to my refuge leave saying “What was this guy thinking?” than “Tres manifique.”

You’ve heard about the potty planter in my garden. You’ve been told of the dead tree garden box. I’ve uncovered the ease of painting single word monikers on flotsam pulled from the marsh. Let me tell you about the trashy beauty and legend of a “ bottle tree.”

For those of you who may not have heard of one, or have never seen one, let me define what a bottle tree is: It’s a tree made out of bottles. (A wise guy, I know.) These trees may be as simple as a two-by-four piece of lumber with some holes drilled through it with the necks of empty colorful bottles stuck in the openings. Some “bottle trees” are made from dead trees that have their branches cleaned of any leaves and/or slanted holes cut deep enough into the trunk, that when you find empty soda bottles that float up with a spring tide, you could stick them upside down in these holes or on the bare branches. My friend Carolyn Smith has a massive piece of driftwood in her backyard with cobalt blue wine bottles stuck on the remaining branches. My “bottle tree” was made by a friend who welded some iron together to form a “trunk” with small wavy “branches” up and down each side on which I have placed empty rum bottles made of handblown clear glass. The tree can be anything you imagine, as long as it holds empty glass bottles. In fact, a bottle garden near my moth-er’s house in Columbia is nothing more than some em-pties of every color imagin-able stuck up-side down on the tops of varying length pieces of rebar that have been randomly stuck in the ground. And, nowadays with its reemerging popularity, you if you do not feel like making your own “bottle tree”, you can find them in many garden centers -sans- the bottles.

Wine bottles make exceptional branch-tips for a bottle tree because of the many different colors of glass that you can find in wine packaging. The common browns and greens of wine bottles come in a thousand different shades. You can also find purple, red, and orange bottles with a bit of searching. (Besides, wine consumption is part of the fun of gathering materials for your tree.)

Beer bottles, liquor bottles, soda bottles, juice bottles - theres no end to how many sizes and shapes you can collect for your project. When your tree is complete, on a bright day you will mesmerized by watching the sun play in the bottles. Sparkles and flash bouncing off and through the colored glasses like a giant kaleidoscope. The clear bottles catching rays as bright as diamonds and sprinkling them in your garden.

“Bottle trees” are nothing new. In my mind’s eye, a “bottle tree” had always been nothing more or less than a nifty way of disposing of your empty bottles and saving the back-breaking labor of toting those heavy things to the recycling center. They really do have a history and here is what Mr. Bill Steber of the Houston Institute for Culture describes as the birth of the bottle tree:

“Once a common site in the Southern landscape, the bottle tree is now an increasing rarity as ancient folk beliefs and customs fall from common usage. The origins of the tree date back to the 9th century Congo where hand-blown glass was hung on huts and trees, as a talisman against evil. The practice consists of removing the foliage from a tree (preferably a cedar because all the branches point heavenward) and placing the tree in the yard of the house. The bare branches are then covered with colorful glass bottles that attract any evil spirit that may be lurking near the house. The spirit becomes mes-merized by the play of sunlight through the colorful glass and thus becomes trapped inside the bottle. When the wind blows past them, the moans of ensnared spirits can be heard whistling on the breeze.”

When I am sitting in my garden after some long and tension filled hours at the office, I revert back to this description of the tree being a trap for the evil in this world. I like to think that when the breezes are blowing in off the marshes, and the bottles are singing a mournful song, that those howls are my tensions spiraling into an abyss, never to return to my garden. Problems may attack me at the office, they may attack me in an airport, they may attack me at an upset client, but I always have a depository in my bottle tree to shed that weight off my shoulders. Once just a pretty thing to look at, now, thanks to Mr. Steber’s lesson on its history, my bottle tree is also a black hole for the dark issues of the day. It is a drain in my garden, where I come to flush out the evil spirits of a world moving to fast for its own good.

Drink wine, my friends, and build yourself an escape in a bottle tree.