Sunday, October 21, 2012

Garden Art Panels for Your Garden


Some of you know that my garden was selected for my county's Master Gardeners' Garden Walk in July 2013. It is in a small yard.so I thought choosing a signature color might help pull it together. I had for Handsome Son's graduation painted every paintable surface with federal park dark green and found it too severe and unimaginative.

To lighten up my garden, I selected this green apple color. The stray blue plastic pot was given a couple coats of this shade and now waits for its 2013 planting out. As you can see, I have mounted three swirling metal window boxes on my deck windows. I don't plant a lot of annuals, but I thought these boxes might be just the thing filled with either alyssum or bacopa, dragon wing pink begonias, variegated spider plants, and limey green sweet potato vine.


The top band on my clay pots have been given a swipe of this signature color.

The trellis was quickly resprayed and is now rehung on the dark brown fence from which it seems to leap.


Some of my metal garden chairs were also repainted in the signature green apple, while these two retained the dark federal park green, but were given an individual touch all their own. On the way to a cohesive look in the garden, I realized as a plantsperson might, that the green squiggle was not actually a green squiggle at all or even a fern frond unfurling as Dr. Darrel Apps suggested, but a young seedling emerging from the seed root radical and unfurling proto-leaves.

This proto-plant is the subject of the graphic triptych (top picture) I think might be just the thing for the bald space next to my apricot tree. By simply adding the proto-leaves at a jaunty angle to the squiggle, I have my stylized design. Painted in broad strokes in my signature green apple on MDF panels sprayed with a dark brown similar to the fence color, and outlined with a white paint pen; I have my art pieces.

I kept this simple by just drilling through the face and putting painted screws in the fence to mount my art. I realized after hanging, one of the screws needs to be painted the green apple to stay with my individual panel's peculiarity of its design. I other words, I wasn't stressing to keep each panel exactly the same. Young seedlings have their differences, too.

In addition to being an easy art piece, it has the advantage of using a tester paint sample I had mixed to match the spray paint I choose. The spray paint was the simplest method to paint my trellising. The repainting of the chairs and the puling together of the stray elements in my yard with his signature color has run me the cost of three cans of spray paint and the one tester (still half full). That's a lot of bang for the buck.

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