Almost everything in our garden is junk. Junk is good. Junk is mostly free or very cheap. Throw nothing away. It can almost always be used for something else. Our kitchen scraps become compost to feed the plants, banana peels are tossed into the hanging stag horn ferns. We use water from a rain barrel. We are not too proud to pick up neighbors trash. Well, I'm a little shy about that, but I'll tell Wayne about the clay chiminea a neighbor has sitting out for trash collection and he trucks right down there to ask her if he can have it. It had a chip out of the top. It's just amazing what people will toss. We put the little chiminea out on the patio with an orchid sitting on top and a candle inside. Someone else's discarded baker's rack is now a plant stand. Orchids sit on an old chair.
I've found lots of great ideas in
Garden Decoration from Junk
by Leeann MacKenzie. One idea we've put to use is to hang old mirrors Wayne's always bringing home from yard sales on our stockade fence. They create an illusion of more space and allow us to see our garden from a different perspective. Sometimes the mirrors look like a window into another space entirely. We've aimed one so that we can see from the patio who's coming around the other side of the house and be prepared with a friendly greeting or a baseball bat.
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