Cork Decor

Ignore the photo for a minute OK?I have a zillion houseplants because back in the day I was too poor for furniture and so used plants to fill up the spaces.  I couldn't afford any wall decor either and used plants to decorate them.Here’s how it's done for the wall decor:

• Take a wine bottle and drink everything inside it.
• Scour the Internet for a bottle-cutting kit which when it arrives turns out to be this incredibly primitive tool.
• Use it to cut your wine bottle in half, sanding the jagged edges so you don’t open an artery while working with it.
• When cut edge is smooth, take and upend it, forcing the cork back in.
• Fill with potting soil and a small hanging plant.
• Drawing on your memory of childhood games of Cat's Cradle, fashion a free-form sling out of twine, slip bottle inside and suspend whole thing from a bracket on the wall.

You can even water it right in place because of that nicely corked bottom, so there's no peeing of excess water down onto the sofa. It’s like those ads for VESIcare where the funny pipe people walk around with gauges and sphincters inside them in their mid-sections. (Now you can look at the picture.) Same thing, see? No fear of wetting! Same total confidence for your furnishings!Here's how the gizmo looks in this picture from the Internet. The plant is too scrawny and a white-wine bottle with its tapering neck would have been much more graceful than this red-wine one but you get the idea.To show what I really mean I just ran upstairs to the Museum of 70s where all my old clothes and ten thousand photograph albums sleep and enchanted sleep and came up with this picture of a wall of my living room circa 1978.:

Cool plants flanking college roommate’s original drawing, also way cool

Get the idea? That's philodendron, the growingest plant there is. And dirt is free, right? And hey you were going to be drinking wine anyway, right! World's easiest wall-decorating idea, and almost as good as Elvis on black velvet. 

Plants Rule

I keep so many plants in my house because they’re growing whereas I’m definitely kind of wilting ha ha. Plus I feel so for them. I sometimes wish I could toss a few of the homely ones but how can I when they’re so earnestly doing what God asked of them? Plus as decorating elements they’re a total bargain.We have a hydrangea bush outside that makes fat white snowballs every summer. They’re like these big dreamy scoops of vanilla from the Dairy Queen.Then, every fall, all that fluffy white goes a soft dusty rose color and by about now their stems are so brittle you don’t even need a scissors to pick them. You can snap them right off, toss ‘em in a trash bag, then find a sunny corner to sit in while you strip off all their leaves (which would just wilt and wither.)Not the awesome blossoms though! They’ll last you a solid year, carrying on from one October almost all the way to the next. You can arrange them in a bowl or vase mixing them together with a few berry–studded stems and a few snippets of leaves from the plant called the burning bush say and you’ll have this lovely symphony of warm merlots and burgundies which you can lighten up with some of the soft grays of lamb’s ear say. Then come the holidays you discard all but your hydrangeas and offset them with evergreens and maybe some clean white carnations.I used to make wreaths my hydrangea blossoms and sell them to unsuspecting strangers for $40 each.

nice huh?

The possibilities are endless. AND Our hydrangea bushes are huge, they must have 1,000 blossoms right now.So come on by and I’ll give you an armful - but you’d better hurry. First hard frost and they’re crisper and browner than a dead oak leaf. But right now ? when I took this picture not 24 hours ago? Well as the Romans used to say res ipse loquitur, or, the thing speaks for itself. (Like most of Nature's handiwork , eh?)