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Community Corner

Antique of the Week: Wrought Iron Bottle Tree at The Red Collection

The bottle tree, an African tradition that migrated to the South, is now available in wrought iron form at The Red Collection.

Bottle trees are a southern tradition. Drive across the flatlands of Mississippi and you'll be greeted by blue, green, clear and sometimes red bottles, hanging on the limbs of trees, shining under the sweltering sun of the South.

But don't let Southerners tell you they came up with the idea. Bottle trees existed long before the South. According to Felder Rushing, a Mississippi Southerner and author of 16 gardening books, bottles trees first came into existence around 1600 B.C. in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

It was during this time period, Rushing says, that people began to leave bottles outside to capture or repel evil spirits. When African slaves were brought to America many years later, they brought the tradition with them. Slaves often placed bottles in trees to trap the evil spirits around them. They then corked the bottles and threw them in the river to wash them away.

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Some time after that, Americans decided that these bottle trees made beautiful additions to their yards or gardens. Thus, the American bottle tree was born.

The Red Collection, a consignment shop on East Main Street, is currently selling a wrought iron bottle tree for $169. 

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One of America's most beloved writers, Mississipian Eudora Welty, captured the image of the bottle tree in her prose.

Our front was a clean dirt yard with every vestige of grass patiently uprooted and the ground scarred in deep whirls from the strike of Livvie's broom. Rose bushes with tiny blood-red roses blooming every month grew in threes on either side of the steps. On one side was a peach tree, on the other a pomegranate. Then coming around up the path from the deep cut of the Natchez Trace below was a line of bare crape-myrtle trees with every branch of them ending in a colored bottle, green or blue. There was no word that fell from Solomon's lips to say what they were for, but Livvie knew that there could be a spell put in trees, and she was familiar from the time she was born with the way bottle trees kept evil spirits from coming into the house--by luring them inside the colored bottles, where they cannot get out again. 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.

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