Recycled Metal Yard Decor – Fun, Eco-Friendly Art For Your Backyard

Enthusiastic gardeners are likely to be very environmentally friendly people. They enjoy digging in the dirt, recycling and composting, and successfully incorporate other people’s cast-offs into their yard decor. When searching for unique pieces to enhance their back yards, recycled metal garden art is a popular choice.

Recycled metal garden art is a reflection of the eco-artist’s ingenuity and talent. What may be trash to you or me is reborn in the hands of these talented artists. One artist, Andrew Chase, makes amazing mechanical statues of giraffes, elephants and robots from recycled plumbing and automobile parts. He gets discarded transmission and engine parts from his local auto shop, and by combining these with plumbing fixtures and pipes he is able to create fantastic, moving creatures.

Discarded oil tanks and drums are quite often used to make metal garden decor. Coloured oil tanks that once supplied fuel to cottagers are reborn into brightly colored critters, including dancing sheep, climbing frogs, lurking alligators or Fido with his bone. For a change of pace you can even add a devil or a diva!

In Haiti an expanding crafts community is producing stunning metal wall art from flattened drums which were once used to transport oil or other products. After removing the ends these drums are flattened then carved by hand into exotic pieces of art. Using only chisels, hammers and other simple tools, the artists crave beautiful exotic pieces out of the steel. Steel drum art from Haiti is renowned world-wide and increasing in popularity. Inside the house or in the garden, it makes a striking piece of wall art.Saving bikes from early graves a new breed of artists are choosing discarded bikes parts to create their art. Bike art is becoming so trendy it is a genre of its own. With spokes and wheels, nuts and bolts and gears, a bicycle may be the ideal raw material for recycled metal art.

Some of the appeal of recycled metal garden art may be the weathered and often rusted look of the various pieces. Rusted metal has a earthy, natural look and blends with the garden rather than making a loud statement. For this reason many gardeners try to get pre-rusted metal art.

The imagination of artists working with recycled metal never ceases to amaze me. For instant charm and character, add some recycled metal art to your yard.

Ann Wallis is a long-time gardener and lover of beautiful things for her garden. All year round she pores through gardening magazines and websites looking for colorful perennials to fill the holes in her garden and fun, whimsical metal yard art to add life and character to her yard. Ann’s favorite metal creations can be found at http://metal-garden-art.com