Posts in Garden Antiques
Autumn Vintage Container

DSC_0891 There is nothing like a vintage container with a beautiful "warn and warm" hue to fill for a simple autumn display. This is some sort of vintage bucket, which is big, and can be re-purposed for all kinds of objects that remind you of fall. I found the bucket on a whim at Gardenology. This is a great home decor shop that also offers unique vintage pieces. They now have two locations, Encinitas, and Newport Beach. It is fun to stop in regularly, just to check out their "chic" displays.

In all kinds of toffee hues, I have this container displaying various dried gourds that I have grown in years past. If you look closely, you'll see my favorite--the apple gourd. I've written about growing these whimsical apple gourds in detail before, Apple Gourds, and include a link to where to find them at Burpee Seeds. I had a few pieces of faux leaves and acorns that adds a bit of fluidity to the design. This display is so simple and timeless, it is hard to determine what is real and what is faux.

Some other options to use in an autumn vintage container such as this could be dried sunflower heads, dried flowers and pods of all types, gourds, pumpkins, indian corn, bundles of wheat, and even feathered-covered balls.

This vintage container will work through all of the seasons, creatively filling it with fun objects of each season. Do you have a favorite container that you fill and decorate with each season. Please share what you like to display for autumn in your favorite container.

Garden Trug at the Buffet Table

Garden Trug Re-Purposed For Buffet Table Look  for all of your tucked away garden trugs,  and use them for entertaining, like this one re-purposed for a fall buffet.

A vintage garden trug, dated 1962, and purchased at a flea market a few years ago, adds "oohs" and "aahs" when guests start serving themselves to a little morning brunch. Turned upside down, and strategically placed on the table, this trug gives a special occasion dish added height, interest and character. Clipped branches of bay laurel leaves garnish the corners.

Garden trugs are traditionally a shallow basket usually made out of strips of wood, intended to hold cut flowers or fresh produce. They can be re-purposed for many uses, from garden to home.

Goat Cheese, Smoked Ham, and Artichoke StrataBon Appetit 1997, is the dish highlighted on the vintage trug. This recipe is supreme for any special occasion from Christmas morning to Easter Brunch. This recipe is a favorite among my garden friends, and my first introduction to it.

It requires quite a few different ingredients, and time assembling, but well worth it at the first bite. To help a hostess further,  it can be made a day ahead and chilled. For vegetarians, smoked ham can be replaced with fresh spinach.

Please share how you use your garden trugs. Please comment on your favorite trug.

 

VintageGardenGal Tidbit Thyme....

Timber Press has a new book out,  Concrete Garden Projects. This book offers up an inspiring array of creative projects that can be made for next to nothing. Follow the easy, step-by-step instructions to make containers of all sizes, benches and stools, ponds and birdbaths, pavers and stepping stones — and even a barbecue.

Celebrating the release of Concrete Garden Projects, Timber Press is hosting a two-week long giveaway from October 11-21, 2011, where entrants can win a copy of the book, a $25 gift certificate to Home Depot, and a set of molds. Readers can enter by submitting their email address at, Concrete Garden Projects. Good luck!

 

Beauty in Burlap

Beauty in Burlap When my husband and I remodeled a year ago, I carved out a perfect office and workshop area in a single car garage. With the addition of our new master bedroom wing, it created this small, private, very intimate garden room which I can look out and access from my office and workshop. I planted a Podocarpus hedge along the north fence on one side, a row of espaliered Silver Wave Camellias along the stucco wing on the south side, and the third side was my very old working garden shed to the west.

In the middle of this garden room, I created a pea gravel square edged with dwarf Euonymus and placed my vintage garden baby fountain smack in the middle. My garden baby fountain, see Everyone Loves a "Garden Baby"  finally had a permanent home, after years of transit traveling around my garden.

The reason I'm describing all of this in detail is because I had an unappealing open door and side of my garden shed which desperately needed some sprucing up. The answer was burlap, the reasonable landscape burlap which has incredible texture, durability, and vintage-like appeal. This is another idea for garden economizing--reasonable landscape burlap as a material. If you don't know about it, you must look for it at your garden and landscape centers. I find my burlap locally at Grangetto's. You can also be creative and re-purpose coffee burlap bags.

I created a small vignette with an old warped wood table, matching symmetrical pots, a pair of young cypress trees for height, and blue-gray shutters for interest and color repetition.  I pulled out my "dusty but trusty" sewing machine, and loosely measured my spaces as everything was uneven. Presto, a working burlap curtain door, and a sweet table skirt for my table. I secured hidden dowels to hang the burlap for my shed opening and table. I also dug out one of my old hooks, and placed it on the side of my shed for a quick way to hold up the burlap curtain door when I needed the large opening.

What a difference, and what beauty in this burlap. Think of this landscape burlap material when you have a project where it might conveniently lend itself. Please share if you use this burlap material already in your garden. Please comment on creative ways you have worked with this burlap.

 

This Frog Doesn't Ribbit

Last weekend, I experienced this year's  Secret Garden Tour of La Jolla, and was thrilled at the homes and gardens showcased on the tour. Each home had an Artist in the Garden, Designer in the Garden, and Musicians in the Garden, which elevated the garden settings to poetry.

At one of my favorite homes on the tour, this historic 1925 home was decorated in tasteful architectural salvage. The table display, and Designers in the Garden, were Etceteras in La Jolla. I loved their entire table vignette, but was absolutely smitten by their vintage frog place card holders. I had never seen them so small and dainty. A perfect anchor for a name card.

The entire place setting with the pewter cups, peacocks, fruit, woven  twig place mats all  worked  together to create a warm and inviting table.

Vintage flower frogs are fun to collect, and can re-purposed for holding table place setting, cherished photos, bills, business cards, and even their original purpose--flowers. Vintage flower frogs can be found at shops like Etceteras, fleas markets, garage sales, and online.

VintageGardenGal Tidbit Thyme...

Attention Chicken Lovers! Spruce up your chicken coop for VintageGardenGal's Annual Chicken Coop Photo Contest. Send in your photos this month to bonnie@vintagegardengal.com

Seek Containers With A Past

Vintage Cherub Planter Charms I love finding great vintage containers with a past. They have a history, the intrigue of previous owners, time-worn patina, and usually multiple imperfections. All of which create an incredible charm and uniqueness.

One of my favorite pieces in my garden is this tiny charming cherub statuary, diligently overseeing her thriving succulent planting of echeveria and string of pearls. She might also hold a candle glowing with a soft romantic light, or some sweetly-scented dried lavender. I have a lot of cherubs in my garden, for a touch of femininity, and maybe to evoke a certain mystique.

This sweet little cherub was once a fecund green, now muted and disappearing in places. She was broken at one time, and someone cared enough to mend her. I purchased her back east, so she has journeyed far. She definitely has a past, and now she has a present and an ongoing future.

Don't overlook these types of vintage container treasures as they can add oodles to your garden charm with their simplicity and sheer survival. Best places to find these vintage container treasures, is often where it is most reasonable. Seek out your local flea markets, thrift stores, garage sales, alley dumpsters (no kidding), barn sales, and favorite garden antique shops.

Please comment if you have a vintage container treasure that makes a statement in your garden? You believe that one person's discard, can be another persons' treasure?

Everyone Loves a "Garden Baby"

Vintage Garden Baby Fountain

I absolutely adore my "garden baby" fountain. Before an estate sale, it had been cherished in someone else's garden for a very long time. In a way, when I purchased my "garden baby", I felt like I was taking guardianship of this precious little concrete soul. To me, a "garden baby" exudes the spirit of a garden in another form other than plants. It captures a kaleidoscope of emotions such as love, purity, bliss, innocence, oneness, and peace.

I started researching "garden babies", and found very little, which added even more to their mystery. Usually found in a statuary or fountain form, why were they so popular at one time? What do they symbolize? What is their meaning in our gardens?

So, I asked two friends who are experts on the subject, and I share with you their insight on "garden babies".

Pat Welsh, an incredible gardener and garden writer for over fifty years in the San Diego area. She writes about "garden babies" from a historical European perspective.

"Statues of babies and children in gardens go back to ancient times. In England, especially, they sometimes have a sorrowful meaning. Since the 19th century, and probably long before that, people made little gardens in memory of babies that had died or were miscarried. Creating such a garden was a way to deal with grief. Sitting in such a garden gave one a place to mourn surrounded by statues of babies and it provided a special place to pray for a baby who had died. People still make these gardens today in memory of babies who died or miscarried.

In the Renaissance plump little boy angels, called putti, became popular. These also were often seen in gardens or as carved decorations on buildings, sometimes just for fun and other times to assuage grief. It made people feel better to think of their own little angel flying around happily in Heaven.

Statues of Greek and Roman gods lend romance to gardens and make us remember the deep mythological roots of garden-design and garden creation. Statues of deer, birds, turtles, rabbits, and other animals bring life to gardens and symbolize closeness to nature. Statues of children in gardens make us think of happy, carefree childhood out in nature. Statues of babies symbolize innocence, joy, and protective love. The mythic idea of a naked baby in a grassy glade or laughing in a fountain makes one think of one's own soft naked skin against the leaves, grass, cooling water on a hot day, and all the other textures in nature. The contrast in textures must have been particularly pleasing during eras, such as the Victorian era or the Elizabethan era, when the upper classes, the people who had gardens, were so covered with many layers of clothing they could never feel the sensual pleasures of being lightly clad or naked out in nature."

Pat Welsh, "The Resident Gardener"-Author-Public Speaker-Garden Consultant, Pat Welsh's Southern California Gardening, A Month-by-Month Guide.

Beau and Nancy Kimball, own the highly respected, Kimball & Bean Architectural & Garden Antiques business, situated on a historic 1830's farm homestead, fifty miles northwest of Chicago, Illinois. Beau writes about "garden babies" from an American architectural perspective.

"I believe that the "garden baby", although born in Europe, is more of an American creation than a European one. Prior to the turn of the 19th century almost all garden sculpture was of a classical Greek or Roman form. Starting with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago 1893 and continuing through the Paris Worlds Fair of 1900, a whole new form of humanistic, less severe sculpture began to take hold in the Paris ateliers of American sculptors like Lorado Taft and Frederick MacMonnies.

Several of their students including Janet Scudder (the "Frog Fountain"), Edith Parsons (the "Frog Baby") and Sylvia Shaw Judson ("Bird Girl" and the "Naughty Faun") became famous by supplying Gatsby age society clients and their estates with fountains and statuary made from carved stone, lead and bronze in this new friendlier form that included pixies, fairies and children.

Unlike the earlier classical sculpture, this humbler form also turned out to be the perfect style for the hundreds of thousands of newly minted suburban gardens of the post WWII building boom - especially when created in the more egalitarian concrete. Almost all of what we see today was produced in the last forty years. I often see it as being described as "1940's", but, it in my experience, it can almost always be documented as post 1960's at the oldest."

Kimball & Bean Architectural and Garden Antiques 3606 South Country Club Road Woodstock, IL 60098 Phone 815-444-9000 Fax 815-444-9002 www.kimballandbean.com

Many thanks to Pat Welsh and Beau Kimball for sharing their expertise and perspectives. "Garden babies" is a fascinating subject. If you have a "garden baby" in your garden, or have additional information to comment about them, please feel free to share.

Creative Repurposing

Over Zealous Blooming Leek Creative Repurposing Makes for Great Vintage Garden Accessory Ideas

1. Search for wonderful vintage iron bed frame ends, and secure them in your garden as a support for a heirloom tomatoes, climbing beans, or an over zealous blooming leek.

2. An old rusty pail is perfect for forcing rhubarb. Remove the bottom of the pail, place widest end in the ground around a bare root rhubarb plant. As plant grows and matures, rhubarb stalks stretch for the light, growing long straight stalks that are off of the ground.

3. Secure an upright vintage apple picker tool in your garden. Plant a flowering vine such as a clematis at the base of it, and turn the top-cupped portion into a small bird feeder.

4. A child's size vintage iron bed frame end, turned upside down and hinged on one side makes for an interesting gate and entrance to your garden.

5. Plant an old metal oil funnel with something small such as succulents, violas, and place in an old single bedspring for a holder.

6. Use a vintage carpenter's tool tote, with different compartments as your seed organizer. Keep in a dry place.

7. Find a vintage garden gate or vintage sheet of decorative wire, and hang horizontally from the ceiling of your tool, potting, or storage shed, and use for drying your favorite herbs or flowers.

8. An old iron pulley wheel, or vintage ice tongs create an interesting way to hang a flowering basket of color, such as salmon-colored trailing geraniums.

9. A vintage horse muzzle can be transformed into a splash of color, when lined with moss, potting soil added, and planted with your favorite lobelia.

10. Long-handled vintage garden tools, secured together with wire, can be shaped into a distinctive and whimsical archway for your garden or favorite pathway. Plant with purple runner beans or your favorite morning glory.

11. Vintage plant stands make interesting and perfect gazing ball pedestals in your garden.

12. Find a beautiful vintage garden tool with character and patina, mount it to the door of your chicken coop, or potting shed, and use as a handle.