Partly cloudy skies. Low 67F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..

Partly cloudy skies. Low 67F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.

ABOVE: Bottle tree art has become a staple of garden decor. RIGHT: Originally, bottle trees were created by placing empty bottles on dead tree branches.

ABOVE: Bottle tree art has become a staple of garden decor. RIGHT: Originally, bottle trees were created by placing empty bottles on dead tree branches.

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. If one doesn’t believe in magick, one will never find it.”

There’s a kind of hush over the garden, the air heavy, expectant. There is only the barest of a breeze tickling tops of trees, silhouetted against a dwindling, twilit day.

When I stepped out onto the deck with my glass of cool evening refreshment after a hot day, I was struck by nearly total silence, save for the constant murmur of traffic on the interstate — and even that seemed muted. No cicadas, no frogs, no crickets. Not an owl, mourning dove calling nor even a barking dog to disturb the almost eerie stillness.

A trio of deer across the fence stood staring, motionless, their ears pricked and tails stiffly upright. The wheel of the sky paused silently overhead; the waning, gibbous moon was poised to rise. A single star hung like a crystal, caught between tree leaves; a lone firefly echoed its spark.

It was as if the garden and the world, by extension, was listening, watching, waiting, gently humming to itself. I stood still, caught in timelessness, not willing to move, being absorbed into the calm, unaware of my self and not willing to stir the tranquility that surrounded me like a cocoon.

The ancient Taoists called this state of internal quietude a living midnight: The highest nature of the human soul is to be still, level, the surface of an undisturbed pool reflecting an endless sky. And that was where I seemed to be, but not of my choosing. It is as if nature herself took me there, or as if the matrix was in stasis, like that moment at the top of a Ferris wheel just before it drops.

A moth fluttered past my face and the spell was broken as the matrix reset. Motion-sensor lights flicked on, and I was suddenly in a pool of light that shimmered through the blue glass in my hand, turning my red wine to deep violet. A dog yipped in the distance, and with answering chuffing snorts, all three deer bounded off into the edges of the woods, half-grown fawns at their heels.

Just off the deck, the rising moon bounced deep cobalt fairy-lights off a bottle tree centering the day lily garden, one of several that have guarded Chaos from “evil” spirits for decades. Years ago, as a folklore aficionado and lover of blue glass, bottles in general and millennia-old rituals around them, I became fascinated with the lore surrounding bottle trees. That was when hanging blue bottles on dead tree branches became popular mainstream garden decor.

Origins of bottle trees, passed down through folklore and shrouded in superstitious legends, are rather murky. The custom may have been practiced as early as the ninth century in West African coastal BaKongo, or perhaps even earlier in Europe.

Brought to the American Old South and Caribbean by enslaved Africans during the 17th century, it was an African hoodoo (not to be confused with voodoo) spiritual practice. As fields were cleared, bottle trees were erected to protect crops, placed near crossroads to keep spirits from confusing travelers and in dooryards to prevent malevolent spirits and misfortune from entering homes.

Quickly adopted by superstitious and empathetic rural Southerners, bottle trees soon found their way through the Appalachians and into gardens from Memphis to New Orleans, deeply ingrained into the culture of the American South.

The most common belief was that evil or malicious spirits, lured by bright colors of the bottles (not always blue, though it was the preferred color), would go into the bottles at night, and thus trapped, they could not get out. A moaning sound as wind blew across the bottle’s open mouth would indicate a spirit was ensnared, to be dispatched by morning sun. No word on a following cloudy or rainy day, though sometimes the branch was cut, bottle sealed and thrown in a river or other running water to be carried away.

In some customs, blue glass was considered magical, helping trees and crops grow. Blue glass, first made with cobalt in Mesopotamia and China some 4,000 years ago, has long been worn as a talisman of protection, its aura a shield keeping evil spirits away. It’s often represented with a tiny blue bottle filled with protective herbs, stones, hair or graveyard dirt.

Small blue poison bottles may have been placed under doorsteps to “poison” an enemy who crossed it.

One tale relates keeping a captured fairy in a blue glass bottle to bring good luck, like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, though the annoyed fairy didn’t see it that way. She was let go in the end after causing all sorts of tribulations.

For more than a century, bottle trees in gardens and yards were commonplace sights when driving country roads through the deep South, though the custom gradually faded. It probably would have died out by our times had it not caught on with garden designers and morphed from simple bottles stuck on dead tree branches to high-end garden sculpture.

Mississippi garden writer Felder Rushing helped popularize bottle tree arts with his blog, in which he called them “redneck Chihuly.” His book “Bottle Trees and the Whimsical Art of Garden Glass” was instrumental in starting my feet on the blue bottle glass road when visiting his bottle tree installation at Fernwood Botanic Garden in Michigan, though I’m sure he doesn’t know it. He stated, “Two rules for bottle trees: Stop throwing bottles away, and stick them on something out in the yard.”

So when I went home, I did. Several bottle trees have come and gone, and as far as I know, there are no mischievous spirits roaming about Chaos. Except for raccoons. Darn bandits won’t get into the bottles.

Sandy and Jim Parrill garden at Chaos, their acre of the Ozarks in Joplin. Sandy is a lifelong gardener and a Missouri master gardener. Jim is a former garden center owner and landscaper; both are past members of the Missouri Landscape and Nursery Association. Email them at sandraparrilll@sbcglobal.net and follow their Facebook page, A Parrillel Universe of Wonderful Things.

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