The Blue Bottle Flower

Today I worked a bit on the blue bottle flower for the bottle wall. Here is a photo of after I started wiring it up. Seventeen bottles in all! The center will have a light green salad dressing bottle in it.

The plan is to hang this on a support over the bottle wall and start mortaring around it.  It weighs about 40-50 pounds right now. I will be adding welded wire around the outside to hold together the concrete band. Once I get the concrete done and set up I'll cut away the plywood band and the support structure.

 

Here is the bottle flower on Easter morning! I used some salvaged lumber to brace it in place, it took an hour to do this and the first try was exactly where I wanted it. On to making mortar and adding bottles so the support can be removed. Those are our Sugar Snap Peas in the background, should be flowering in days.

 Meg planted this mixed package of daffodils we bought on clearance at Home Depot last fall. Several of these came up, I really like it any one have a clue to what it might be?

When I moved in here 14 years ago I planted this honeysuckle. At one point it had hundreds of bloom clusters like this one. During the building of the addition  in 2008 it was left growing under the new deck and had been abused by all the building processes. In 2009 I moved it to a new location, the droughts have left it barely alive. This year it has 20 or so bloom clusters so it is making a comeback!! You know when I bought this I did not know the native coral(red) honeysuckle grew at the edge of our woods.