Plastic or concrete?
Somethings just happen you know. I have a plastic swan because I couldn't find plastic flamingos. I thought it would be a little kitch like for me to do. So the plastic swans sits in places as a humorous accent. While cleaning off my mom's front porch area with all her planters filled with two years of weeds, I decided to bring home her concrete swan. I never had the opportunity to ask her where it came from and my brother too is gone, he might have had a clue about it's appearance on this porch. I just brought it home, hernia making and all. It is extremely heavy and I took the dirt out of it to lighten it a little. I will repair and paint it eventually but for now it just has a new home.
It is a bad combo that I didn't intentionally create. I had an area of coneflowers that flourished and in the front of them, I haphazardly put in this daylily. I didn't probably know it's color at the time because it wasn't blooming and I bought it at the Iowa Arboretum sale.
I messed up the growing environment of the coneflowers by putting in a recycled wooden fence to the south of the bed. It cut down on the sun that they needed, so they started declining. The daylily started spreading more each year and ended up crowding in among the few remaining coneflowers. Thus I have this strange color scheme. If I have time I may mess with the situation this year and thin out the daylilies and move some of them elsewhere.
We are painting on the mural a lot these days as we are backed up to a deadline now. It is going good but we have a lot of distance to go. I am a detail person and I want you to see the lines in the siding of the trolley and the brass of the handles. I keep studying train wheels and I think I have what I want. My wife is doing landscape and sky and clouds and trolley seats and we just keep humming along to the beat of a deadline. We work well together and each just does the parts that they run into at a time. The trolley is actually a background to a lot of things that will be placed on the loading dock and a conductor checking his time schedule.
8 comments:
Those petunias are going to be pretty spilling over the sides of the swan. Your mom's swan is pretty too; we have a concrete bird bath that is real heavy to move also.
I personally don't think there are any bad combinations of colors in the garden. I know the butterflies, bees and hummers love them all regardless of color!
Best wishes to you and your wife on the mural. Can't wait to see the completed project.
The concrete swan will be a nice addition to your garden, especially when you get it 'overhauled'. I love the colors of the petunias in the plastic one. Your daylilies are so pretty. I would like to have that color in my garden. Most of mine are dark or light yellow. I think the red would be a nice contrast.
Your mural is going to be soooo nice! I love your flowers and your concrete swan planter.
i like the day lilies in front of the cone flower - the day lilies won't last long enough to worry about them really -
can we see a bigger shot of the mural? even unfinished?
The trolley looks great but I didn't catch where you are painting this mural? I think it's awesome that you and your wife can work on the same project. Jack and I would be a disaster at something like that.
I vote for concrete. Long lasting (if it's good enough for the Romans...), low maintenance, and not derived from petroleum. How can you wrong? :-D
I think the concrete swan in really beautiful, but I don't think I would personally paint it. I like the age and patina that came from sitting on your mother's porch for so long. Sitting in that bed of (creeping jenny?), it would be just beautiful with some soft trailing white flowers like scaevola, or maybe the callibrachoa called "Terra Cotta"?....
I agree with some of the other readers about the combination in the bed. I don't think it's bad at all, plus you have great differences in texture between the echinacea and the daylily. If the garden makes YOU happy, that's really what it's all about!
I like the concrete one also..it has character..I wouldn't paint it either..but I like old crusty looking stuff! Your plastic one has it's place also..and it will look great when the petunias fill out..except that white one will get lost. I like the cone flowers with the Daylilies..but the cone flowers probably would do better with some more sun. I have that same Day Lily..Red Magic..they look just like velvet. The Mural is coming along! I can't wait to see the whole thing! :)
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