You have to be really good at it and has to fit your garden. I always see ornaments that look great at another garden and I am certain they will look awful at mine. Like Ragna said once: "It has to make your heart sings". If I were you, I would check online for ideas (Pinterest, maybe?) and after certain time, will make an educated decision.

Omar

I have one crappy bottle tree base made of some sort of metal pipe with heavy wire bottle hangers that insert into welded hangers. In theory, a very pretty idea. The downside is that even after sinking it into a big coffee can of cement as an anchor and burying it almost to the bottom-most hangers when fully loaded with bottles, it flops over to the ground in a hard rain. It was free, so I kept it and hang other items among a smaller load of bottles.

On the other hand, I get a lot of compliments from neighbors and visitors on my very uniform blue beer bottle tree. It's going to stay since the 6 inch diameter post is buried with a cement base and my husband spent a lot of time and thought in placing the deck screws. No pictures that I'd be willing to share, the area around it looks like heck right now! It's hard to keep groundcover intact in a shady area with two big dogs running around.

I like shiny colored glass in the garden, but I'm not sure I'd do another bottle tree at this point.

bottle trees are not passe'. They have a long history, three thousand years Felder Rushing says, and we are not near done with them yet.

Some people are just now discovering them.

Can't wait to see your idea.

She is alive!, she is alive!!

Omar

This thread is a bottle tree resurrection (as well as mine), eh?

Two hundred and eight bottle tree discussions!

Roselee, glad to see ya. I’m supposed to see tree this afternoon at 3pm

Omar -- get out a' here!!!! LOL

Bossy, I wanna' see what you're gonna' see this afternoon!

Ha. Lady hadn’t called me back so still sitting, waiting for her call and watching the 7th inch of rain fall, woohoo!!!

I’m delibetating whether to do it multi or mono color.

The last one looks “legit”.

Omar

Meeting postponed due to rain. Manana.

I got the item. DH still thinks it’s a waste of $ but I don’t. I think I’m gonna get a few bottles b4 I post here.

Bossy, you mean you're gonna' make us wait some more???!!!!

Oh well, in the mean time I came across this from a Succulents and More post about the recent Blogger's Fling in Austin :

"Bottle trees

"Bottle trees seem to be a Texas thing. Or maybe they're popular all over the Southwest and South. There were bottle trees in at least half of the gardens on our tour. One garden had five or six of them!"

Scroll down for Photo of several bottle trees ... Click to enlarge.

Miz_G, love the bottle tree pictures you posted. But where does one get purple bottles???

I’ve seen at HL, purple.

Me, too (Hobby Lobby). I need some, I only have red and green ones. My bottle tree would look like a Christmas tree. :D

i think the prettiest trees are the ones made w/the cobalt blue bottles BUT I’m a red kinda girl. It’s gonna take me a little while to get bottles. Then I was thinking about yellow bottles but don’t know if they’ll show, then I was thinking about multi-color......not much goes thru my brain, does it? Ha

Red bottles are hard to find and expensive! Beware of the ones with a red film, they will fade and peel in time.

I also wanted red, but quickly gave up.

One of the most beautiful bottle trees I've seen was on an Inside Austin/Master Gardeners tour a few years ago. All the bottles were from Bombay Sapphire Gin and that color in a woodland setting was enchanting.

Wow those bottles are beautiful. I don’t drink gin and ea 1.75L is $35. I’ll make s few calls to the local bars and see how hard these are to get (as discards), that Aqua would be stunning.

I could get regular clear bottles and paint them aqua, while I find the real McCoys. I played with painting glass garden ornaments, it involved baking at 200 and it worked relatively well.

I have not seen aqua bottle tree, that would be interesting.

Why did I not take a photo in that garden?!? Still mad at myself. I like gin once in awhile so might have tried to slowly empty a few bottles but the price stopped that idea before it began. Good luck finding the bottles ;-)

Tinted gin bottles sounds like the right way to do it. My attempt with 2-liter 7up bottles didn't work out so well. Maybe it was the uncola effect.

For another style of bottle tree see the next to last photo on this blog post: Danger Garden; Jungle Behind Jungle Fever Exotics

This one would take some serious time on a high ladder, but other than that I like it.

Bossy, still waiting to see your bottle tree. Thanks to Mizan and Mike I still have more blue bottles to use.

Ragna, I had to go back a second time to see the tree. Very different but lovely. I liked the whole garden armosphere, including the rebar zig zag thingymado. Where has everyone been this winter. Not many comments

June, I really like the yard featured in the post and was so busy looking at all the great plants and their placement that I almost missed seeing the bottle tree.

I don't know where everybody else is, but these last couple of warm weeks I've been pulling weeds, moving stuff around, (plants and garden 'art') and getting the wrought iron in the yard ready to spray paint.

How about a bluebonnet bottle tree?

Wow -- how clever is that????