Blue glass bottles hang overhead like leaves from a tree. The sunlight turns the glass into sparkling jewels. The light also drives away “the haints.” For artist-welder Stephanie Dwyer, Southern bottle trees have driven away her demons.
Dwyer spent weeks this spring in Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center constructing a quartet of 17-foot high bottle trees. The trunks curve gracefully and the branches reach out to intertwine. Instead of leaves, the blue bottles fit over the metal “twigs.”
Friday, Dwyer was back in Orange talking to visitors and students about her creation, entitled “The Dancing Sisters.” She will also be at the gardens on Saturday. The Stark Foundation commissioned her for the art display. She already has her next commission lined up. She’ll be creating bottle trees for the Smithsonian’s African-American museum.
The tradition of the bottle trees goes back to the 1700s and African slaves. Originally, the bottles were hung on tree branches or small trees. The bottles were to catch “the bad spirits, or ‘haints'” away, Dwyer said. One legend has the sunlight evaporating the spirits trapped in the bottles at night. Art turned into the sun for Dwyer. Creativity has let her happy spirits out.
Originally, she was from Washington State. She started a two-year welding course as a way to get a job. After completing the course, she worked in a refinery welding pipes and then a fabrication shop, welding to blueprint plans.
But a dangerous domestic relationship landed her in the hospital. “I was broken in spirit,” she said. A counselor told her to leave town and go a long distance because the man would get her again.
Her mother and step-father were living in Mississippi. “Mom said, ‘You need to come down here and heal,'” she said. Dwyer packed a U-Haul trailer and headed south. It was a longer trip than she expected.
After arriving in Mississippi, she went to a welding shop, searching for a job. “The way the men looked at me, I said ‘no way.'” So she started using her welding to make small items and she sold them off the back of her truck. One woman asked if she could make a bottle tree. Dwyer had never heard of one. But if you are a welder in the South, sooner or later you’ll make a bottle tree.
“Once she told me the African connection, that closed it,” Dwyer said.
The bottle trees were once common sight in the yards of small, rural houses on the byways. “Some people think they’re tacky,” Dwyer said. The bottle trees have developed into a popular garden feature, moving into more upscale settings.
Blue bottles are the most traditional color for the trees. Dwyer said poor sharecroppers bought cheap liquor to drink. They needed milk of magnesia for their stomachs after the rotgut booze. She said when people through the years tore down the old sharecropper shacks, they would find dozens of the blue bottles. Milk of magnesia still comes in blue bottles.
The bottles she uses resemble wine bottles. “Did you drink all the wine?” is a question most people quickly ask. She buys empty bottles from Northern Brewer Company.
`Though Dwyer isn’t from the South, she has bonded with the friendly people. She recalls that after moving to her mother’s house, she had problems with her alcoholic step-father. Neighbors became her extended family. In addition, she talks lovingly about a married couple in Pascagoula, Mississippi, who commissioned artwork, like a chandelier for an oak tree. Their payments would pay her rent.
“My family thought I was nuts when I was doing this,” she said. “They said ‘get a job.’”
She moved from Mississippi to 170 acres outside Paris, Tennessee. There, she has room to play foster mom to rescue dogs and cats until they find permanent loving homes. Art, animals and happiness are now in her life. Besides bottle trees, she makes fire pits, trellises, and other garden items. Shangri La ordered custom trellises for a new section of the gardens to feature vines and climbing plants.
Those trellises are decorated with blue birds. One has a cardinal on top because of something special at Shangri La. When she started her bottle trees in the spring, a redbird would fly around her and sing, sometimes as close as two feet away.
Two of her special friends after she moved to the South were a couple, Barnes and Gail. They nicknamed her “U.S. Steel.” After she finished the first bottle tree at Shangri La, she learned through Facebook that Barnes had passed away. Gail told her she didn’t want to bother her when she was working on the project. After Dwyer told her friend about the cardinal, Gail told her another Southern legend. The redbird represents a deceased person. “Anybody that you love can come back to say goodbye to you,” Gail said.
These days, art, animals and happiness surround Dwyer. “God’s got his hand on me,” she said. She hopes people can find joy in her work. “In the big picture, it’s not about me and the bottle trees, but how they are bringing people together. You can’t be on this planet and not give back anything.”
Dwyer will be at Shangri La Saturday to meet visitors and give short talks about bottle trees and her art. The gardens are open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission fees are charged. Members of the Stark Cultural Venues are admitted free.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
Dwyer, center, poses with Orangefield students who visited the gardens Friday.
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