The bottles are wedged, upside down, on the lower branches of a yew tree that is oddly bare on the bottom and green on top. "When the sun comes up, the blue actually glows. It looks liquid," says Kanamee, 41.
"It gets us through winter," adds Petravich, 42.
Bottle trees are a long-standing Southern thing, embedded in the life tapestries of African Americans, especially in the Mississippi Delta. Traditionally, live or dead crape myrtle and cedar trees were decorated with bottles - often blue Milk of Magnesia ones - intended to trap evil spirits and prevent them from entering the house.
But bottle trees are popping up in other parts of the country, as chic - or not so chic - garden art, made on a base of powder-coated steel, iron rebar, or odd pieces of metal.
Garden-supply companies sell them. So do entrepreneurs with catchy names like "Bottle Tree Bob." And enterprising artists and welders are reinterpreting the original form, using blue, green, amber, red, and clear bottles to create high-end trees, chandeliers, arbors, hummingbird feeders, fountains, even magazine racks.
"Bottle trees are whimsies to some folks, folk art to others, and an evocative art form to yet others," says Felder Rushing of Jackson, Miss., author of 15 gardening books, who has studied bottle trees in the United States and around the world for many years.
The newer ones may also represent what sculptor Virginia Maksymowicz describes as "outsider art" crossing over into more sophisticated forms. "The bottle may also be a representation of the human body with a spirit inside, which may be why artists like them so much," says Maksymowicz, associate professor of art at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster.
