Garden Sculpture Projects & Ideas
Garden sculptures can add a touch of artistic style and class to your backyard garden, office courtyard or mansion grounds. Carve sculptures of various animals out of thick bushes, build lawn-covered furniture sculptures you can rest on while admiring your handiwork and create leaf-cast basins for birdbaths using hypertufa. Turn your garden into a playground of artistic expression with creative sculpture projects and ideas. Does this Spark an idea?
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Sod Furniture
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Build living sculptures out of soil covered with strips of sod. Build living sculptures out of soil, bricks, concrete, metal and sod to provide space for you and your guests to enjoy your garden. Cornell University's Horticulture Department provides a series of videos with examples of living sculptures covered with sod. Create a sod covered couch or chair. Level out an area of your garden where you wish to build the sod chair or couch. Build a stable structure in the shape of a chair or couch. Use shovels and a tamp to compact soil into the shape you want to cover with sod. Use bricks, concrete blocks or pieces of metal on the sides of the sculpture to keep the soil in place if needed. Cover the soil with fresh sod. Water the sod often during the first few weeks until the grass has a chance to grow roots into the soil structure. Trim with garden shears as needed.
Hypertufa Leaf-Cast Birdbath
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Make a concrete cast of a giant gunnera leaf to use as a basin for a birdbath in your garden. Hypertufa is a type of concrete recipe including Portland cement, peat moss, sand, poly fibers, silica fume and a bonding agent such as wood glue. Make a hypertufa cast of a giant gunnera or elephant ear leaf as the basin for a garden birdbath sculpture. Create a mound of dampened sand to form the leaf into the shape of the basin you wish to create. The taller the mound, the deeper the leaf-shaped basin will be. Use the hypertufa recipe from the Artistic Garden website or purchase premixed sculpting cement to make a cast of the leaf. Apply the mixture evenly across the surface of the leaf. Use a knife, putty knife or a sharpened stick to trace the leaf edges. Wait for the mixture to cure before turning it over. Peel away the leaf and decorate using eco-friendly concrete paint or glaze.
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Bush Sculptures
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Carve your bushes into beautiful shapes. Create bush sculptures in the shape of animals, creatures, or abstract shapes throughout your garden or as a fancy centerpiece to draw the attention of your family and your guests. Bush sculptures can be as simple or complex as you want to make them. More complex sculptures take research, planning, time and patience to accomplish differences in color, structure, shape and texture. The My Modern Metropolis website gives some stunning examples of sculptures carved from bushes that will get you inspired to create and design your own. Incorporate different species of moss, shrubberies and vines as well as wire and wood skeletons to speed up the project and make the shapes more exact.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit midget sculpture image by timur1970 from Fotolia.com sod-cut pieces image by Jeffrey Zalesny from Fotolia.com giant gunnera plant image by Benjamin Jefferson from Fotolia.com Zarcero sculptured bush, Zarcero's church, Costa Rica image by Oren Sarid from Fotolia.com
