Blue Bottle & Finial

There would seem to be a resident flying squirrel in the garden, judging by the reflection in the bottle just under the neck in the photo below. Or, to indulge in a paranoid cliche, possibly a UFO silently glided over the garden when the photo was taken. Or, as a smarty pants in the family opined, it has something to do with a parabolic effect. I’m going with the flying squirrel. I like the M.C. Escher funhouse distortion in the bottle, the bowed ribs of the pergola against the blue glass sky.

The perfect fit of the bottle and finial started a binge into blue which was to last the next few days. Because didn’t I have some tumbled blue glass somewhere in the garden brought home from Building REsources? Yes, indeed, which I had used to outline nerine bulbs, so I wouldn’t inadvertently stomp on the bulbs in their dormant phase. I checked the gravel garden, and sure enough, there was a scattering of blue glass shards, no longer in neat outline around the nerines but strewn about and half buried in gravel. I picked up every shard and gave them a good wash. In my defense, I plead summertime. It’s long, it’s hot, and it can make eccentric activities seem like seriously worthwhile pursuits.

The blue glass mulch was left soaking in water for several days on a table in the kitchen, with no greater purpose or plan in mind. Then I became distracted redoing some plantings in the front gravel garden, moving agaves a few feet over, removing the one-off succulents and adding bigger swathes of a particular favorite, the Mexican Snowball, Echeveria elegans. For a fresh gravel surface, I cheaped out on the gravel, which is approximately the same light grey as the echeverias instead of the pricier warm buff color I had used in the past. All that work for a fairly disappointing result. Something else was needed to draw definition to the white echeverias against the grey gravel. Which just happened to be soaking in a bowl in the kitchen, freshly washed, bright and shiny.

Once the echeverias grow in a bit more, the blue glass will disappear, so it is a bit of mid-summer silliness. I do know it’s not easy to throw away a cobalt blue bottle. I couldn’t do it. But for the sake of blue glass mulch, I’m glad not everyone squirrels bottles away in their garden sheds.