1. Christmas Tree. In a perfect world all your garden plants would be real plants, but while you wait for your ground cover to spread and save for real bonsai trees you need to find something to fill the empty spaces. Michaels Art Store sells little fir trees around Christmas. With a starting price of $8-16 each they are too expensive to buy in the beginning of December, but come January the price drops 75% to $2-4 each. Planning on buying bulk I discovered at a Dollar Store that sold them for $1-2 each. I bought all of them and was able to create I nice evergreen forest.
2-4. Aquarium Plants. What could be better than plants designed to be underwater to put outside. The colour on many aquarium plants can be too bright to look natural outside and the price per plant can be quite high. Since home aquariums have been around for a long time, finding used and faded plants in second hand stores and garage sales are common. Since our forest areas are a dark green, I placed these plants by the waters edge where they look at home.
5. Bonsai Tree. My parents had this bonsai tree when I was a child in the 1970s. It never looked quite right on their coffee table. It is fragile plastic so stepping on it is a bad idea. In a world where it is hard to have plants with an interesting trunk the bonsai is a welcome addition.
6-8. Worn Plastic tree. Leaving a plastic tree outside for over a year in the blazing sun and freezing cold can really take a toll. Melting, cracking, breaking and fading are all possibilities of how the plants will react to being outside. Considering a real miniature tree can be purchased for $5 you shouldn't pay much more for a fake one. We used the plastic trees as place holders to one day be able to cultivate a real beautiful tree. This first tree is near the end of it's tour in the layout and soon will be retired.
9 Topiary. There are so many different artificial plants made of different types of plastics, woods and other materials. These topiaries have wooden trunks and we did not think they would do very well outside considering if stepped on it would splinter. To our surprise they are still with us lining the brewery parking lot.
10. Dollar Bush Ball. I don't understand why interior decorators thought that plastic bush balls in big glass vases make great center pieces. I would rather see a chocolate cake in the center of my table. (GRIN) We found use for these oddities by digging a hole and burying half of it. For a $1 a bush, you cannot go wrong.
11. Dollar Grass. One square foot of plastic grass for a dollar. When we saw this at a local Dollar Store we were very excited picturing the residential community covered in beautiful short grass that would never have to be trimmed. We purchased a couple dozen of these plastic mats and trimmed them to fit around the little driveways and houses. There was only one thing we did not think about: The weeds. It was impossible to pull out the weeds without lifting the green squares. The bushy green sprouts soon came apart in some sections and we were only left with the structural grid on the mats. They soon became ugly, impracticable and we had to rip them all out and throw them away.
12-14. Glass Trees and plastic flowers. Usually found in Thirft Stores, these are a quick way to add colour a layout year round. If you want happy flowers in your layout in the dead of winter these are the plants for you. Some of them did not stand up too well over the past year and we decided to retire them
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