On the whole, I am not a fan of garden ornaments, especially little girls with watering cans. Figures like these seem intrusive in the natural landscape, somehow demeaning it.

There are some other ornaments that enhance nature’s gifts and are welcome additions, however. One such is a sky blue ceramic ball created by artist Elizabeth MacDonald. It draws the eye to the flower bed where it rests among the gray lamb’s ears. The contrast of color, form, and texture is pleasing.

Over the years, the surface of the ball has developed patches of lichen, so once in a while, Elizabeth touches it up to maintain the lovely color.

The blue ball has had several different homes in the garden, the first in an island bed with a dwarf Alberta spruce. Together, the pyramidal evergreen and the ball suggested the Trylon and Peresphere from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. This arrangement worked well, but eventually, the spruce grew too big and overpowered the ball. So from the island bed the ball migrated to the far end of a perennial border, where it now serves as a punctuation mark.

I also have three beautiful bronze and copper sculptures by Roger DiTarando, a Connecticut artist of great skill and sensitivity, especially when it comes to birds and beasts. There is a frog resting on a lily pad and an elegant dragonfly, but my absolute favorite piece is a twiggy nest where three fledglings strain their scrawny necks upward, huge-eyed, beaks wide open. The nest is firmly wedged in the crotch of a 60-year-old rhododendron and looks as if it belonged there.

Behind my barn there is a vernal pool where green frogs call in the spring and dragonflies flit back and forth just above the water. I have made a little foot path around the pond and installed a bench on the far side. I thought that somewhere there would be a perfect place in the woodland garden for the frog and the dragonfly, but I haven’t found it yet. Beautiful and appropriate as they are, these small sculptures would be lost in the woodland garden. At the moment they grace the mantelpiece in the sitting room.

The successful use of ornaments in a garden depends on two things: suitability and scale. My 19th Century farmhouse is surrounded by forest, and while my beautiful little metal sculptures couldn’t be more appropriate for the vernal pond, they are just too small. They would be lost among the tall ostrich ferns and robust marsh marigolds.

I wish I could afford one of Roger’s great blue herons. They are such elegant birds with their long necks doubled back in an S-curve and their streamlined bodies perched on long, thin legs. A heron would look wonderful at the shallow end of my pond, standing on one leg, the other poised at an angle for the next step.

As gardens grow and change, so the ornaments must move with the times.

Love your gardening, 'til next time!

Sydney Eddison has written seven books on gardening. In addition, she collaborated with the Color Wheel Company on The Gardener’s Color Wheel: A Guide to Using Color in the Garden.

For her work as a writer, gardener, and lecturer, she received The Connecticut Horticultural Society’s Gustav A.L. Melquist Award in 2002; The New England Wild Flower Society Kathryn S. Taylor Award in 2005; in 2006, the Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut’s Bronze Medal. In 2010, her book Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older won the American Horticultural Society Book Award.

A former drama teacher, lifelong gardener, and Newtown resident for 60 years, Eddison’s love of the English language has found its most satisfying expression in four volumes of poetry: Where We Walk: Poems rooted in the soil of New England (2015); Fragments of Time: Poems of gratitude for everyday miracles (2016); All the Luck: Poems celebrating love, life, and the enduring human spirit (2018); and Light Of Day: Poems from a lifetime of looking and listening (2019).