Garden fun | Art, decor add joy to outdoor spaces
Getting outdoors and planting a garden can be rewarding.
It can improve your health, both mentally and physically. But it can also just be—fun.
Last year, we asked you to share your lawn and garden art—the pieces of your yard that make you smile and add a touch of whimsy to your life. We got dozens of submissions, and we appreciate them all. But, here are three that made us smile just a little bit wider.
From trash to garden treasure
When George Gow’s wife, Nancy, asked him to take out the trash, sometimes he had other plans for the items she was ready to throw away.
“I’ve always tinkered in the garage,” Gow says. “When my wife said, ‘Take this out to the trash,’ if it’s little things that I think I can use somehow, I put them in the garage.”
One of those “little things” was the round top of a four-legged stool. Gow’s creative juices started to flow and he realized adding some lawnmower engine gears to the circle as “eyes” would make it look like a face. He enjoyed the creation and hung it on a wire in his Richmond garden, and the first of his garden scarecrows was born.
A piece of plywood became the body and with other supplies—handles, faucets, old eyeglasses—the scarecrow morphed and grew.
“I had so many pieces, I made a second one,” he says. “And eventually, I had seven.”
Gow’s scarecrows are a thing of artistic beauty, which is no surprise given his other interests. A retired professor in the Department of Applied Engineering and Technology at Eastern Kentucky University, Gow has another hobby: painting. He’s been juried into 26 national level art shows.
A former consumer-member of Blue Grass Energy, Gow and his wife recently moved to Louisville. The garden he built and worked for 33 years is now being used by its new owner, and the four remaining scarecrows are getting a second life with a friend in another part of the state.
