Silver in the Garden
The image of the gardens that I’d love to make on our property may be a little bit out of my ability, but there are still alternatives that can be done. There are beautiful features that I’d love to have, some of them include big beautiful urns with ferns and overflowing greenery. It’d be so beautiful to have things that are green and lush, and rich.
Alas….I have champagne taste and a beer budget, if you know what I mean. If you want to purchase those beautiful Urns, they run upwards of $50-$100 to start for one about 12 inches tall. There must be, and are, cheaper ways to accomplish similar features without going broke in the process. In the recent past I’ve researched Hypertufa, which looks promising. The ingredients are awaiting my attention. But in the mean time, I still wanted to start pulling some items together.
What I can afford is a couple of dollars to spend at a second-hand store. Enter, vintage and antique silver vessels. It’s pretty mind blowing that it is more economical to spend money on real silver than it is to go and buy something brand new. Silver isn’t exactly en vogue these days, so it is fairly cheap and easy to come by.
What I look for:
Ice Buckets, large serving platters, vases.
And though they are not (typically) made of silver, I also keep an eye out for very large cooking pots, sivs, and fancy looking soup servers. These all have a good amount of space inside for planting.
As far as the plants go for filling these vessels, I like to keep a collection of plants to grow and multiply easily on their own. Things that can be split are great. Even something like strawberries, that make runners, could be a good option for putting in some of these vessels because when they are growing they have a tendency to flow down and hang in a very aesthetically please way.
Now…can we normalize showing off our un-aesthetically pleasing, 80 year old kitchens that are a work in “updating” progress? And that, yes, I do propagate my plants in my kitchen window so it ends up typically being a bit dirty/dusty. I have a “working” home, not just a museum house. Just like with the fancy vessels that I can’t afford, also I have to update my little kitchen a bit at a time. I think this is more normal than what you might see on social media and across the web. And I enjoy sharing how I do things a little bit more economically so that maybe someone else can benefit from these ideas, too. No gate-keeping here. Let’s be friends and share our tips and tricks to help one another live the life we imagine.
