Gift ideas for the gardener

If you have a gardener on you shopping list this holiday season, as a public service, TPP is making some gift suggestions for the gardener in your life. As a general rule you are not going to find garden gifts on the cool end to the spectrum at big box stores.  Because of his no endorsement, no plugs without payment policy of bringing you the best in free blogs, no links or vendors are provided but with a bit of web searching you can find everything.

Thai spirit house - Almost every home and business in Thailand has a spirit house, and they are decorated with flowers and burning incense sticks every day to keep the spirits happy. TPP thinks they are quite charming and need to become more of a thing.  In upstate NY many gardens had up ended bathtubs turned into Catholic shrines.  Sort of the same thing here but less plumbing.

Stone or concrete sculpture - You can find all sorts of garden sculpture made of stone or concrete, the trick is to find something nice, like an elephant down spout deflector. TPP is still waiting for his. Simple is oft times better than fancy.

Garden Bar - Every real gardener needs a garden bar, some place to stop, sip a cocktail, and enjoy your garden. They can be big, but honestly if your idea of sophisticated is a tiki bar, you're shopping in the wrong place.  Some garden bars for the small gardens can be mounted onto a fence, wall, or out building.  This is a really cool idea.  At the other end of the spectrum TPP has been collecting green, standard wine bottles with the idea of using them to construct a bar or wall in the garden. The best part of this idea is that you have to empty them first.

Citrus fruit juicers - These come TPP approved. Some of you may argue that this is a kitchen gadget not a garden tool, if so, please go back one item. 

Gardening Attire for the stylish gardener - Actually one of the more practical items of gardening attire is a simple shop apron. They tend to be darker in color than kitchen aprons so they don't show the soil so much.  Not much else is needed when you get right down to is.

Garden Sink - The more TPP thought about the last suggestion it became obvious that another great suggestion would be an outdoor sink for washing up. And before you run out and get a laundry utility sink, look around a bit for something a bit nicer. This if for your garden after all, not your guest bathroom. 

Holiday Gift Idea for Botanists & Gardeners - Wear Your Produce

Uh oh, the Phactor has been caught only thinking about himself again, so best to correct that situation right away with a really amazing gift idea for HER. Why not wear your garden produce year around helping to solve that perennial problem of what to do with too many zucchini? Artist Margaret Dorfman makes some amazing jewelry out of zucchini, star fruit, beets (r-l), and watermelon radish, as well as decorator bowls out of potatoes. They hardly sound elegant and you cannot imagine how such mundane items become attractive decor, but thin slices are turned into parchment, and this is not so weird when you remember that cell walls are cellulose, the stuff of paper. At some location now lost in memory a book was on display whose pages were parchment made from slices of watermelon. One can imagine the juicy story those pages could bear, and it was so strange to not grasp what you were looking at until someone told you, and then it was quite clear, but ever so nifty. And yes, people will ask about these striking objects.

Garden Gift Ideas

What with the holiday season approaching, many of you are probably wondering what to buy for the Phactor, so here's a garden gift idea. While searching through image files this nifty item turned up and once again was moved onto the "things of beauty and a joy forever" list of potential acquisitions. To explain, things of beauty and joys forever must fundamentally be big and heavy, and ideally found rather than purchased, but since this is unlikely, let's forego that stipulation. Such items figure into a personal gardening philosophy which is that people wandering through our gardens should find delightful things, surprises, hidden away to be discovered, like our 200 lb sleeping sow garden bench. So yes, the Phactor really, really wants an elephant downspout, maybe two.