A Bottle Tree: There Goes the Neighborhood

Mrs. Nasty and I installed an art project last weekend, and it got the neighbors talking.

Since we live in the Midwest, our neighbors aren't familiar with bottle trees. We never knew about them either until Mrs. Nasty went to school at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi where John Grisham has a home, the guy who has a bottle tree in one of his (many) novels that got turned into a movie, A Time to Kill. In fact, a fine eating establishment in Oxford is called the Bottletree Bakery, and it's one of the best places I've ever eaten for breakfast. Really good strong coffee too.

I've always associated bottle trees with being a Mississippi thing although I've read that they're used as garden ornaments throughout the South. The folklore goes that bottle trees capture and/or ward off evil spirits. And I've always liked them because they're colorful and strange looking. They aren't subtle.

As we also found out, they invite questions. After we installed the metal tree with its empty bottles on Sunday, our next door neighbor stopped by that evening because, as she said, "The neighbors are all wondering what that thing is in your front garden." So the other neighbors sent her to ask about it.

I explained the whole deal to her--that we got used to seeing them in the South, we've always kind of liked them, they're supposed to have protective qualities, and so on.

I can certainly understand the initial shock of seeing a bottle tree since I had a similar reaction myself when I saw one. My initial thought was, "What the hell is that?" 

And probably to some, the bottle tree says, "Hey clowns, I really LIKE wine!"

To get the colorful array of bottles you see above, it took some time since our tree handles 16 bottles. And good God, I'm tired of drinking that crappy German white wine that comes in a blue bottle, whatever the hell it's called. Mrs. Nasty is crazy about the blue bottles, so I drank that stuff like a man as much as that cliche can be applied to drinking white wine. Unfortunately, I can't get one of the azure-ensconced bottles of wine I actually like in this little burg I live in, St. James Winery's School House White, a German style wine out of St. James, Missouri. Nevertheless, I prefer red wine, which comes mainly in green bottles.

One of the funnier comments I've heard about our bottle tree is what our neighbor told us her husband said over the phone. Her husband is long-distance trucker who travels mainly in the South. She told him about the bottle tree and how it's supposed to ward off evil spirits. His comment to her was that it obviously doesn't work since it didn't keep her from visiting our porch.

That's some funny ball bustin,' Doug. Cheers to you.