Bottle Trees

You’ve seen them, and if you are from the South, you probably know someone who has one in their yard.  Take a tree (preferably a crepe myrtle) and start shoving empty bottles over the ends of the branches.  You can use blue bottles if you are a traditionalist, and damn near any color bottle if you’re more artistic.  The result is a Southern Bottle Tree.  

You’d be surprised at just how long man has been playing around with glass.  Long before he could make it himself, he could find small pieces of decorative clear glass in deserts, the remains of where meteorites that had exploded in the silica-rich sand millions of years earlier.  There were examples of this in King Tut’s tomb.

Man-made glass dates back to roughly 3500 B.C., in the Middle East, with the first hollow shapes created after 1600 B.C., in Egypt and Mesopotamia.  Glass production advanced dramatically, becoming an important trade good throughout the Mediterranean world.  By 100 A.D., clear glass was being produced in Alexandria and the Romans had begun mass producing both cast and free blown glass objects using tank furnaces that could hold as much as a ton of melted glass at a time.  

These early Roman bottles were obviously designed as much for their aesthetic appeal as for their utility.  The bottles range in color from pale blue-green to brown and are both spherical and bell shaped, with long tapering necks.  Several of the bottles have a separate decorative rope lip applied around the mouth...And those mouths may be the start of the real story of our bottle trees.

The wind blowing over the tops of those bottles produced an eerie sound that had to be obviously the work of demons and evil spirits.  This is roughly about the same time that the stories of genies in bottles started appearing.  And then, poor Jeannie had to wait over a thousand years for Major Nelson to show up and…. Oops!  Wrong story!

The bottles—and the belief in trapped spirits—made their way south into Africa, eventually reaching the Congo, where there was already a custom of decorating the graves of family members with plates and various household goods.  It was here that the custom of bottle trees was born.  And when slaves were brought to the new world, they brought the custom with them.

The “logic” of bottle trees is easy to understand.  The light of the sun shone through the glass, attracting the evil spirits lurking around houses.  Once inside, the spirits were caught like flies in a bottle, unable to find their way out again before the intense sunlight killed them.  Think of it as home security—spirit-catching bottle trees around a house would protect you from evil.

It didn’t take long before the plantation slaves were placing bottles on trees, especially crepe myrtle trees (probably because the crepe myrtle is linked in the Old Testament with slaves seeking their freedom).  And the custom spread and endures to this day.

Before some damn Yankee writes me about the quaint customs of hillbillies, I should point out that at the same time those stories of genies spread south into Africa, a related custom was spreading north into Europe, eventually reaching England.  Witch balls were round glass balls containing a single strand of hair or string.  Hung in windows to catch the morning light, an inquisitive witch would enter the ball and become entangled with the strand of hair, unable to escape before the sun killed them.  European immigrants brought the custom to New England, where they are still being made three hundred years later.  Sometimes these witch balls are called ‘watch balls’ or ‘gazing balls’ and are the source of those strange shiny bowling ball thingys you can see atop pedestals in people’s yards.

If you spend fifteen minutes online looking at photos of bottle trees, you’ll notice that about half of them use only blue bottles—cobalt blue bottles.  About five thousand years ago, someone accidentally noticed that if you added little lumps of various metals to molten glass, you got pretty colors.  I can just picture it:  Groups of Bronze Age glass makers running around trying to find something different and interesting to throw into the vat of molten glass to see what would happen.  (Was this one of the first, “Here—Hold my beer and watch this!” moments?).  Eventually, someone tried a lump of brittle gray cobalt—and got a brilliant blue cobalt glass for his trouble.

I’ll bet a dollar that you didn’t know the word cobalt came from the German word, kobald, which means “demon”.  Unfortunately for this story, the Germans named it for the bad spirit that gave them lung ailments when they tried to refine the silver containing cobalt.  It would have been so cool to picture early Germans placing empty bottles of Liebfraumilch onto trees…  Nah, it won’t stretch.

Today, you can generally tell the age of a bottle tree by looking at the bottles on the branches.  If there is a pretty blue, rectangular bottle—then it was made before 1980—back when the Phillips company was still selling Milk of Magnesia in glass bottles.  If there is a straight-sided Skyy Vodka bottle up there in the branches, it was made after 1992.

Bottle trees are the epitome of Southern folk art…. Well, they were the epitome for a couple of hundred years.  Today, they are so popular, you can find them just about anywhere, including in all fifty states.  I spent a little time amusing myself doing Google searches like “Boston Bottle Tree”.  (There are eight there.... And there are twelve in New York City).  You can find them in London, Paris, and Hong Kong.  Well, to be fair, I couldn’t actually find one on display in Hong Kong, but they make them there and sell them on Amazon.

I doubt that very many people are still making bottle trees in order to to catch evil spirits.  (If they were, they’d be all over Washington D.C.)  Maybe bottle trees are popular because Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, took a photo of a bottle trees in front of an old Southern house.  The image inspired the short story Livvie, where she wrote:

Solomon had made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a year, and without a sign that he had any uneasiness in his heart, for he took as much pride in his precautions against spirits coming in the house as he took in the house, and sometimes in the sun the bottle trees looked prettier than the house did.

Maybe.  Or maybe bottle trees are so popular today because, like the artist Jenny Pickford said, she is “holding glass up to the light, where it can sing.”