A Little Whimsy in the Winter Garden

As usual, for this time of year, the garden is a rather depressing sight.  The St. Augustine grass gifted/cursed to us by the builder is dormant and the most sickly yellow color.  

Most everything else is bare, with the exception of the Southern Wax Myrtle and the Savannah Holly, both of which are sporting thousands of berries in which the birds seem to have no interest whatsoever.  

What's up with that?  I thought the birds would be going crazy for the berries at this time of year.

Anyway, I digress.  Recently as I was browsing on Facebook, I found an enchanting page called Flea Market Gardening and their website, http://www.fleamarketgardening.org/ which is filled with wonderful ideas for re-purposing flea market finds or stuff in the attic into decorative items for the garden.

The more I read, the more I realized that I loved these ideas and would like to incorporate some of them into my own garden.

I decided to start simple.  I've shown you this garden trellis before.  It hides the unsightly utility boxes in the corner.  This corner has also become home to the "brush pile", a growing pile of dead bushes, clippings etc that won't fit in the compost pile. The birds love it back there :-)

Since I've had trouble getting anything much to grow over the trellis,  and inspired by the Flea Market Gardening page, I decided to dig through the garage and see what I had that could be used to brighten it up a bit.

I came across some grapevine wreaths that I used to change out on the front door of the house where I used to live.  I used to decorate them with ribbons and silk vines garlands for the holidays, or with silk flower garlands for spring and summer.

Since we have a beautiful glass inset on our front door at the house we live in now, a rustic wreath just never seemed to look right, so they had all got shoved in a corner of the garage.

So I dug one of them out, as well as some ribbon, silk flowers and also some pine cones collected from our road trip last year, put it together and attached it to the trellis. 

I like how it looks, and am now thinking about other ideas for whimsical garden decorations to add in the future.  


Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.