Bottle Chapel at Airlie Gardens

Many of you that read this blog know we am planning on building a bottle wall in our garden. We hope to make it pretty cool. I have been collecting all kinds of bottles.

Working on a design concept to create the 'installation'. My thoughts on building it are as thus:


The concept as of right now is a half circle(arc) about 4-5 foot tall and maybe 10  foot long. This will be build down the embankment of the pond and I plan on fastening a small arced deck to sit on over the water on the pond. We will need steps down the the deck also. To the left of this will be another slightly curved retaining wall about 4 foot high and 15 foot long.  Good news is I'm getting ready to tear out and rebuild a deck into a custom screened porch for a customer and should have lots of 5 year old treated pine to build the deck with, recycle is the name of this project.

Build a sand box and set the bottles in it to figure out the design. Or build a 2 x 8 frame and cover it with fabric or chicken wire and cut holes to set the bottles in the design.

Next clean the bottles to be installed after the bottle design is set.

Then dig footers and hand mix my own concrete with re bars sticking up for strength.

Install some type of temporary guide system so the wall goes up where we want it. 

Then make my own mortar and start building the wall.

The bottles and mortar will need to scrubbed clean and smooth each day after building.

Here are some detail photos from Airlie Gardens  to give you an ideal of what we are aiming for. The design will be ours of course.

 Here is half the swallowtail design, the sun was too bright to show both sides of the wings. I don't have near as many blue bottles as this has or square clear bottles either. The red in the eyes are red glasses, not bottles.

Here is a close up of the wizard faces. I really don't know if they are wizards, I just think they look like wizards. See the clear bottle at the top center with the long thin neck, I have a bottle like that.

At the left of the doorway is a tree, it is lit up from the sun too. I doubt given the hieght of our wall we'll be able to do a tree, blueberry bush maybe.

This is a shrine inside the bottle chapel, I have a tall bottle like on the left.

The back side of the butterfly, lit by the sun.

Very cool huh?  I do not have any red glass at all, one amber/orange rectangle bottle is the closest thing I have to red.

Note all the bottles are pointed down this way no water gets inside them to freeze and break them.

I've several long blue bottles like these. I was at the recycling center yesterday and found 4 blue bottles. Was leaving with 3 blue bottles and this woman emptied her bin and I saw a long blue bottle making 4 for the day! Sometimes it is weeks before I find a single blue bottle.

See the water inside the big blue bottle, a hard freeze and it'll be broken.

Can you see why I want to build us a cool bottle wall?

Airlie Gardens Bottle Chapel

One of the coolest works of  art made from recycled materials I have ever seen. Loved everything about this.

From the inside!

Back side.

Perhaps a shaman?

Wish the lighting was not so bright here.

 The bench on the inside.

About 100 yards away was a very nice screened in butterfly house. This red Admiral posed for my littler G11 camera inside. They were only three native species that I saw in the house; Monarch, Gulf Fritillaries and Red Admirals.

The fountain in the Pergola Garden created in the early 1900s, it is made of coquina. The steps lead down into the pond. Shame I did not have time to wait for better lighting here. Nice place to sit at the waters edge and enjoy the dragonflies along the edges and herons and egrets over the water in the trees.

Some of the details of the pergola. This is for you Dave!

We walked down this shaded pathway only to find not one but two of these double benches facing each other with an built in arbor over each. The other one was prettier but the light was too bright.

A very cool arch in the 150 foot rose arbor in the camellia garden. No roses on it. Below shows some of the detail of the concrete rose arbor.

Hibiscus over 6 foot tall. We missed the real flower show in the spring when all the azaleas and camellias were in bloom. Can you imagine the amount of networking it took 90 years ago to amass 500 cultivars of camellias, oops I left off a 0 that was 5000 camellias.

Here is a year round flower show IMO. This is Live Oak leaves covered in Spanish Moss.

Here is Resurrection Fern, Polypodium polypodioides on a Live Oak limb. For those of you not familiar with Resurrection Fern it is common in our southeastern US swamps, when it is real dry it'll curl up and look very dead. Give it some rain and it come right back to life as in these photos. A fitting plant for the end of this post as Airlie Gardens has been resurrected  in recent years and is now open to the public as well.