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How garbage can help your garden look even better
How garbage can help your garden look even better
Seriously! Your yard can be cooler and cuter than ever with these recycling-friendly crafts from an Insta influencer
By: Maria Ricapito
Most gardeners can get downright obsessive about how their garden looks, which is part of the fun — that’s what can make it a creativity-stoking pursuit, buying whirligigs, heirloom seeds, and what not. And another truth: Most gardeners care about the land and want to recycle and reuse whenever possible.
Put those two noble impulses together, and heed the advice of Angie Calzada, aka Instagram’s whimsically_angie. She shows her almost-40,000 followers how to take leftovers, trash, and busted-up junk and turn them into clever garden ornaments. “I’ve always loved making something out of nothing. I was the kid turning mismatched socks into Barbie clothes,” says the born-to-craft Texan. “I’ve always seen potential in ordinary discarded things, and my love of creating has naturally spilled outdoors.”
Here, she shares some of her favorite, often kid-friendly projects to liven up your yard this fall and beyond.
The raw material: Leftover bricks, pavers, and block. The result: A garden of books.
You may have some bricks that “might come in handy some day” tucked away under a deck or a shed. Calzada’s fun (and viral) take on using them as garden decor: They’re the perfect shape to masquerade (using some primer, paint, and paint pens) as a stack of favorite books when decorated. Let the kids help and pick a theme: back-to-school, holiday classics, even manga.
A tip or two: If you want to bring these indoors, add peel-on felt furniture-protector pads and use the heavier ones as doorstops. Also, don’t overlook broken half-bricks. They can be painted to look like totally adorbs kids’ board books.
The raw material: Broken concrete. The result: A super-cute crevice garden.
Maybe you have fragments of concrete pavers lying dormant in a corner or your yard, or perhaps you’ll find some on your local Craigslist, freecycle site, or the “Materials” page on Facebook Marketplace. Or go talk to your neighbor who had to jackhammer some up during a home reno.
Once you have some of these discards, try Angie’s brilliant idea and make a rock garden, lining up the flat pieces of concrete in pleasing patterns in a bed and then filling in with soil and plants such as hen and chicks (Sempervivum), creeping Jenny (Lysimachia), and woolly thyme.
The raw material: Broken terracotta pots. The result: A fairy garden.
Parents, here’s how to both salvage smashed-up flowerpots and encourage young artists’ imagination. Calzada leans into the damaged containers by turning them into cute fairy gardens. You arrange shards in a larger pot, as if terracing a tiny neighborhood, filling with dirt to keep them from flopping over. Then let kiddos tuck in plants and figurines from the local craft or dollar store to create an itty-bitty city.
The raw material: About-to-be-recycled bottles 
and jars. The results: Sea-glass vases.
If you’re snipping blooms from your cutting garden, pop the bouquets into zhushed-up recyclables. The special twist: You’ve turned them into sea glass with a worn and timeless patina. All it takes to make these glowy vases is basic glue plus food coloring (definitely fun for older, art-loving children) and a bit of brushwork.
The raw material: Rocks. The result: Hand-painted plant markers.
While not exactly garbage, most gardens have rocks that get dug up when tilling a patch of dirt; perhaps 
even an endless supply. Using paint and paint pens, Angie transforms them into plant markers and (as her IG handle indicates) whimsical decorations. This is also a project the kids can get into, writing the name of plants, say, or drawing what they look like to help identify which seeds and seedlings have been tucked where.
About the writer
Maria Ricapito is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Elle Decor, and The New York Times. She lives in the Hudson Valley where she’s writing a thriller and happily tends to a veggie and herb container garden and a pollinator mini meadow in her backyard.