Who said decor can’t be fun? While ornamental gardening is often taken extremely seriously, adding a few elements to make you smile helps to bring gardening back down to earth which is, after all, where it belongs. Need some inspiration? Check out these fun ideas!
1. Dress-Up Goose to Celebrate Special Days
Yes, you read that correctly! This durable plastic goose is a fancy dress icon. On high days and holidays, it can be dressed in special outfits, and on ordinary ones, it adds a touch of country style to your garden. Real geese can be incredibly destructive in the garden, and they’re often rather aggressive, but your dress-up goose looks just like the real thing without any of the drawbacks. Alternatively, create your own garden figurine. Scarecrows are lots of fun, and they can also be dressed up according to the season and special days.
2. Create a Colorful Adventure Playground With Upcycled Tires
If there are kids in your family, giving them space to work off some of that excess energy gives Mom and Dad a break. There are some unusual places you can turn into temporary playgrounds, but the garden is still the best place for one. You can have oodles of fun designing and building an adventure playground for next to nothing. All you need is strong fasteners, some old tires, some brightly-coloured paint, and perhaps some rope and treated poles for swings and frameworks.
3. Add some Amusing Garden Signage
Amusing garden signage has been in the vogue for over a decade. Tell your plants to grow, warn trespassers that they’ll be composted, or choose between any of the hundreds of funny garden signage ideas you’ll see online and in stores. Buy them, or enjoy making your own rustic signage. On a smaller scale, plant tags can also be amusing. “I don’t remember planting this” is one of my favorites!
4. Funny Garden Gnomes
Although some people think that garden gnomes are the height of tackiness, they’ll enjoy a laugh when they see some of the amusing variations on the theme. These include dino or cat figures actually devouring garden gnomes. If that’s too much for you, there are also funny gnomes depicted doing all sorts of surprising things that will make anyone do a double-take before cracking a smile or breaking into laughter.
5. Gargoyle Planters
It’s a relatively old idea: planters in the shape of a head with a cascade of plants growing out the top to represent “hair.” The basic concept has been reinvented many times over, and you can get head-shaped planters representing everything from aliens, to gargoyles, and even bigfoot.
Is it Tasteful?
Asking whether these ideas are tasteful misses the point. To be honest, some of them are well-made and not-unattractive, but the whole point is to make you, and visitors to your home, crack a smile. Sure, gardens are meant to be places of peace and beauty, but there’s no harm in showing that you aren’t deadly serious. There’s altogether too much of that around already!
So here’s the challenge: no matter how seriously you garden, find space for at least one amusing surprise. A tall order? Surely not!
