When making your own garden art, recycled and upcycled materials are the ideal place to start. They cost nothing, they suit an outdoor setting, and weathering improves rather than spoils them.
Old furniture as planters
If you want a creative way to show off potted plants, find an old wooden chair. Paint it in bright colours that complement the planting, remove or cut out the seat, and set a pot into the gap. You have an eye-catching planter that raises the plants to a height where they are actually seen.
The same works with drawers, crates, an old ladder used as tiered staging, or a chest of drawers with each drawer pulled out to a different depth and planted.
The principle is height and levels. A garden at one level is flat; anything that lifts plants changes it.
What makes garden art work outdoors
It has to survive weather. Use exterior paint and seal anything wooden. Untreated wood in contact with soil will rot within a season.
Drainage. Anything holding a plant needs holes in the bottom. This is the commonest reason a repurposed container kills what is in it.
It should look better weathered, not worse. Rusted metal, faded paint and silvered wood all improve with age. Anything that will simply look shabby is a poor choice.
Other materials worth using
Tin cans, painted and hung in rows or used as small planters. Punch drainage holes and file the rims.
Old tools, mounted on a fence or a shed wall. Rusted garden tools have a natural place in a garden.
Glass bottles, sunk neck-down as a border edging, or hung to catch light.
Broken crockery, set into a path or a mosaic on a wall.
Bicycle wheels, used as trellis for climbing plants.
Pallets, which make vertical planters, though check they are heat-treated rather than chemically treated before growing anything edible.
Colour
Bright colours work outdoors in a way they often do not indoors, because the green of the planting is a neutral background that absorbs a great deal.
Repeat a colour in two or three places across a garden. Repetition is what makes a scheme look intentional rather than accidental.
A caution
Restraint matters. A few well-placed pieces read as considered; a garden full of them reads as clutter.
Choose a small number of things and give them room.
