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Handy Alternative Garden Ornaments

Garden ornaments are often more ordinary than is actually required. The ordinariness specified in British Standard is often exceeded by the manufacturers, giving the customer to whom garden ornaments are a necessity an insufficient choice. Garden gnomes, for example, are often to a dress-code which could do with a lot more imagination. And those windmill-things are often under-specified in the amount of electrical power they are fitted to generate.

Whilst the idea here is not a total solution to the problem of conventionality in garden ornaments, it does at least provide an almost instant solution to the boredom and consistency with which garden ornamentation is all to often the victim. And it's cheap.

The Recipe:

First, take a pair of rubber gloves, of the type that are normally for use when washing the dishes, and fill them up with ready-mixed concrete. A sand & cement mixture of 4:1 is ok, and a good quality pair of the gloves is recommended. Make sure the concrete fills the gloves and that there are no air bubbles. Then insert a small plate into the end of each glove to seal it off, or hang them up with pegs on a clothesline. Leave the stuff to SET. Concrete solidifies in a chemical reaction even without the presence of air, so after a few hours, the mixture will have gone rock-hard.

Then, carefully remove the rubber gloves as they can be re-used, either for washing the crockery or for making more of these things. The resulting handy concrete items can now be deployed in the garden. If cunningly placed in a front garden lawn it may appear at a distance as if a hapless person has sunk into quicksand, and may even deter trespassers. If placed in a shallow pond, it may give a hint of the legend of Excalibur. And if artistically used in conjunction with a brick wall, a surrealist image may be created.

Subversive, surrealist, or silly, filling a pair of rubber gloves with concrete is DIFFERENT, and provides a talking point.

News (2001/08) The idea of ALTERNATIVE GARDEN ORNAMENTS comes up in the most unlikely of places. Check out DIGGER THE DOG at Ancestral Collections. However that's a long time ago, and there are a lot more Things to do with the Garden now. Go on, have a look and see what I mean.

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