Bottle Trees

I used to have a module of Flickr Photos of some very nice bottle trees...then, they took them down due to copyright reasons and instead put a link to the bottle trees group. So, if you want to see some photos of bottle trees, go to Flickr and type in bottle trees and you will find a lot of them.

Because I wanted this to be an image rich lens (as all of my lenses are, but this one especially so...you can only talk so much about something so beautiful) I went on another internet search and I found the mother lode. OMG! You have got to see this site called Bottle Trees. This guy has so many fantastic photos of bottle trees that you have to go and see them. I borrowed a photo from his site, I hope he doesn't mind as I am giving credit and links and many, many cudos. This photo is just a teaser. I am serious, go and check out Bottle Trees now!

This photo is of bottle trees in Shangri La Botanic Garden, Orange Texas (photographs courtesy of Greg Grant).

This is the first step...you have to have a tree stump in order to make it a bottle tree stump. So, take a cruise around the local countryside, peruse your neighborhood for someone who may have recently cut down a tree, or check out your own backyard. One of my favorite ways to find tree stumps and limbs for other projects is right after a nasty storm. Where I live, if we have a storm, invariably there will be fallen limbs and trees all around. Grab your saw and get cutting!

Once you have your stump, you will need a drill to drill holes into it, nails or screws, and hammer, and a variety of bottles.

You will need to know which bottles you will use so that you know how long of nails or screws you need, and how far to drive them into the stump. This was a relatively small stump I wanted to place on my picnic table (which, by the way, if you have kids and especially rambunctious boys, not a good place to keep your bottle tree). It looked good for a day, though...then slowly, one my one my bottles started to disappear and no one seemed to know what was happening to them!

I had collected a variety of small bottles for awhile and thought they would be perfect for this stump. I wanted an all green bottle tree, but I didn't have quite enough little green bottles. No matter, there is no rule that says you have to fill the entire stump, much less fill it with the same color bottles.

This may seem to be an easy task, but for it to come out looking right it is a little tricky. First, you have to drive in your nails at an angle. I actually used screws because I couldn't locate my long nails anywhere (Hmm, could it be that rambunctious, yet creative little tool thief called my son again?)

The second thing to consider is staggering your nails or screws so that they are not all lined up in a row and touching each other. Glass is glass after all, and vintage glass is even more fragile, so make sure your nails are staggered and far enough apart to provide the kind of coverage you want and are not touching each other.

Now that you have your stump ready with the nails or screws at a slight upward angle so they won;t fall offf, start slipping on your bottles carefully. At this point, you may have to do some adjusting, such as take that drill and screw those screws in a little farther or out a little more so that the bottles will not fall off easily. Oh yeah, i forgot to mention to make sure that the head of the nails or screws you will be using are not larger than the opening of the bottles. Did that once, and felt pretty stupid.

If you look closely at this photo, you will see where some adjusting is needed. Some of the screws were not quite at the right angle, and the spacing needed to be adjusted.

Now all you have to do is play around with it for while until you get everything the way you want it to look. I mentioned earlier that I had some screws that needed adjusting and I needed to adjust some of the spacing. I also mentioned I wanted just green bottles; but alas, I had to surrender and use some of my little brown and clear bottles as well. Still turned out pretty cool though, don'tcha think?

And that lone screw sitting there without a bottle on the left? Well, a little gnome ran off with that bottle.