hanging from a tree is a cool idea for a mysterious garden feature.
Keys mentioned in the slideshow at the link.
I see you can buy collections of old keys on Ebay for USD$20...
ADDED: What else would you find in a Mystery Garden?
Obscure, mysterious plants, perhaps? Or maybe you'd have familiar plants loaded with symbolism and meaning, but used in mysterious ways.
I'm sure you'd want to have some odd flowers or unexpected colors. Dragon arum certainly belongs in the mystery garden.
Surely the ideal mystery garden would be designed around an old specimen of some kind, like an oak, or maybe a very old rose.
I think broken statues would be very cool in the Mystery Garden--especially headless or armless statues.
Mirrors!
Of course, you'd have a cairn--or an old chimney. Some tombstones off in the corner would be very cool. In fact, old cemeteries (link, link) would be loaded with ideas for the mystery garden.
What else???
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Thanks for the link to that. I read NYT and WP garden sections, that one needs to be added, the other two are getting lamer by the week. I love all things cowboy, being from Oklahoma. The old jukebox titles were great too. The keys thing is very doable, $20? We will wait to see the photo of your keys hanging.
Interesting! Are you getting some keys to hang? I think it's a cool idea.
I have a collection of broken heads and faces in a shady corner of my yard where nothing will grow. When any statue gets decapitated at work, everyone knows to bring me the remains. Not far away is my Amorphophallus, but I don't know the species. I get foliage every year with stems that look like someones skin with a pigment disorder, but the flowers only show their stinky selves every 2 or 3 years.
You may be interested to visit the following garden by deceased film maker Derek Jarman. It is on the coast in England next to a hulking power plant.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/angusf/sets/656542/
Very interesting and a bit eerie. The plan for the future main house is a 1500ft2 single floor with two bedroom suites on opposite ends and a single room kitchen/living room between them. The front porch will even be recessed like his band stage platform in front of the kitchen.
Maybe I did not mention it when I showed my antique wood burning metal furnace from Fort Collins, Colorado, but I do have a tombstone. It currently lives in the back of my truck. Reason M. Guthrie was his name.
More mystery. A friend of mine did something like this in his garden in Florida. A framed working door that opens to nothing and no where.
I just finished making a leaf casting concrete frame for an old mirror, size 16 x 20 without the three inch wide frame. It is still drying. A la Little and Lewis. Now to find the best place for it.
I'm going ahead with a plan to mystery-ize the garden. What to do with the four gnomes? They'll be tricky. Real mystery-defusers, those gnomes.
The keys idea strongly suggested a door to nowhere so keeping my eyes open for a suitable old door. (YEah, I bought $20 worth of old keys on Ebay today. You gotta live!)
Les, Dolls heads makes you sound creepy...I think just one statue with the broken head would be more normal. Thanks for the Jarman link. Did you have that on your blog once? IT looked familiar.
Broken timepieces are good for mystery, an old, chipped tea service left out... vases of dried flowers...
Lots and lots of vining things! Preferably obscuring things (maybe even that old chimney/fireplace) to the point where someone has to pull some vines back in order to try to figure out just what they have found...
Whatever it is, it's got to mean something deep to you if its going to have any magic to it. If it doesn't, you've got to assign meaning to it--religiously. That's my advice.
Christopher C. beat me to it. I was going to say doors that open to no where. If I tried this, I'd invariably go down the creepy road and have gnomes with the eyes blacked out and hands coming out of the ground as a garden border. Unfortunately the resident 5 year old can't handle that right now. One day I'll have my dream, one day.
I like the keys, but the dolls' heads are creepy. We reused three sections of white metal fence that was stashed behind the old shed in our yard. Since it's a mystery why it was there and which of the previous owners brought it there, can I count it as part of a mystery garden? Most of our garden mysteries involve where Philo and I left tools.
Don't know if Christopher checks back and do not have his email. Wonder if his Reason Guthrie was born in 1893.
Annie
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