Bottled-up artistry

An object both common and mysterious, the bottle is now making its way into our gardens as folk art. The bottle as garden art appeared in the film "Ray": The camera pans a young Ray Charles in a rural Alabama yard standing beneath a dead tree festooned with colorful bottles. The "bottle tree" in "Ray" is rooted in the black American tradition of placing upside-down bottles in trees, where they are believed to catch evil spirits. It makes perfect sense, considering that liquor bottles originally contained spirits. Empty a bottle of spirits, put it in a tree and what will you capture? More spirits — and even better, evil ones. This is exactly the kind of tradition that can make a garden more interesting.

Although the bottle-tree tradition started in the South and in the Caribbean, modern bottle sculptures are making their way into Arizona gardens — glass is the new garden jewelry. Take things one step further with the concept of the outdoor room and use bottles in the ceiling, walls and floor.

Using block walls as her canvas, Phoenix-area homeowner Janet Rademacher artfully placed cobalt-blue bottles in the coils of a rusted set of bedsprings and hung the whole assembly on her masonry wall as both trellis and bottle art. The idea of stringing colorful bottles along a bleak barbed-wire fence is also becoming chic and is featured in "The Essential Garden Book" (Terence Conran, $40) as a way of bringing ornamentation to the boundaries of a property.

Arizona gardeners are blessed with a fine selection of bottles, especially soda bottles. Nearly every Sonoran-style hot dog stand in town sells a variety of Mexican soft drinks in glass bottles. In my own garden, I've taken my daughter's collection of Mexican soda bottles and suspended them with bailing wire from our steel ramada, lacing the whole assembly with white Christmas lights. Overhead, especially when illuminated by sparkling lights, bottles make fine bedazzlements. When you have bottles, you have an excuse to keep decorating with ornaments and electric lights long past the holiday season.

In a paving surface, the bottoms of round and square bottles make fascinating additions to brick-paved patios and seat walls. In Susan Mathews' Bisbee garden, antique square-bottomed bottles are arrayed with brick for an old-fashioned look. In the Tucson Botanical Gardens' Barrio Garden, a line of upended bottles forms a novel border for a planting bed.

It nearly goes without saying, but one of the joys of working with bottles in a garden is that you get to consume whatever is in them before putting them into service. If you are using a large number of bottles that contain wine or beer, you might even have to invite friends over to help. As Rademacher remarks: "We needed lots of Tequiza bottle caps, and we must have drank it for a month."

Selecting bottles is a matter of personal taste, but you may want to stick with a theme. Cobalt-blue bottles or the familiar feminine hourglass figure of Coca-Cola bottles look good in groups. In any case, use bottles you like, and remember to keep the most interesting ones out of your blue recycling bin for future garden projects.

● Scott Calhoun is a local freelance garden writer.