10 Garden Ornaments Not To Buy Me
Rarely can you go into an area of a garden centre and say confidently that 98% of what they're selling is tosh. With garden ornaments you can – and I might have been a bit generous with that 98% figure…
ABOVE: A potentially home-wrecking gnome planter that looks like it's halfway between Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and V for Vendetta.
1. Classical statuary. An imitation Venus de Milo might look good in a showcase recreation of an Italian garden, but plonked on the edge of the patio behind a ranch-style bungalow in Thurrock is not what Michaelangelo had in mind. Worse than an exact copy is the approximate copy that’s not sure if it’s a tribute to the great Italian master or a Beryl Cooke and has ended up like a limbless Botichelli.
2. Pottery Meerkats. Does my garden look like the Kalahari to you? We all love the advert. Simples. But that doesn’t mean to say they’re appropriate in a temperate garden. I love hippos and elephants, too.
3. Anthropomorphic Rubbish. A small figure of a frog, or an owl might be quite delightful in the right place in a garden. Dress that figure up in a little suit or give it a hat perched at a jaunty angle and it becomes complete and utter tat. You can buy a figurine for the garden of a mole dressed as – wait for it – a coal miner. Lovely. When your parents go out and buy something like this you know they’re ready for institutional care.
4. Concrete Wheelbarrow Flower Bed. Presumably these are beloved by the same kind of people who buy limited edition ceramic plates out of Sunday supplements. A variant on this garden institution is the concrete donkey with a panier each side acting as a flower bed. Perfect for marigolds, I’d say.
5. Ceramic Snail. The real ones are bad enough, but who in their right mind would want a scaled up version? And why not have the whole set – a ceramic snail, a ceramic slug and a ceramic woodlouse?
6. Cat Climbing Out Of Wellington Boot. This really should be a spider.
7. Buddha (Fat and Cross-legged or Less Fat and Recumbent). The sight of a fat Buddha smiling from behind a clump of bamboo doesn’t fill me with zen-like calm, it fills me with un-zen-like anger. Perhaps it might be kitsch if you could cram a Buddha, cheap bamboo water feature, model temple and stork into a little tableau for £9.99.
8. Smiling Toadstool. Someone must have had an LSD flashback to design this. But that still doesn’t explain how they ever got to be manufactured.
9. Otter/Squirrel Cascade. Fibreglass otters gamble next to a water cascade. From the same totally naturalistic range, three perky fibreglass squirrels perch awkwardly next to water troughs. Great as air rifle targets, though.
10. Hedgehog bootbrush. Possibly the least offensive of this toxic ten. It still smacks of those tacky gift catalogues that used to sell TV dinner trays.
