Contorted and dark..... the evil thing continued to grow.

   A very nice lady brought me a small curly stick with a just few leaves on it wrapped in a wet paper towel. She knew of my love for landscaping and told me it was a "Crazy Willow" and to just poke the stick into the ground and it would grow. I did as instructed and after 4 weeks all the leaves had fallen off . Dejected, I grabbed the little stick and started to pull it from the ground in which I had planted it. Surprisingly, I found a huge root ball growing from the tiny stick. I quickly put the 6 inch stick safely back into the earth from which I had pried it. A mere 3 years later the "stick" is now over 15 feet tall (after I have topped it no less than 6 times to control it's growth and to make it's limbs even more contorted). It is a very nice weeping, corkscrew willow and provides great shade for our pond and rock garden, privacy on our favorite porch spot, and a SUPER creepy looking tree in the landscape for Halloween! One of the biggest benefits to this tree is the excess limbs. You can just poke them in the ground and a tree will spring up (we have 6 in the back yard growing into a privacy screen as we speak) or you can dry them out, strip the leaves, and make a really cool Halloween arrangement. They can be painted any color or left their natural dark grayish brown. You can cut them long or short for any kind of arrangement.
   Here is a very large arrangement that Miranda put together tonight.

   A closer look to show the contortions.

   There are a number of other things you can add to them for maximum creep factor as well as creative use of lighting or  camera effects like shown here with Miranda's free IPOD app.