It seems I harbour a deep-seated suspicion of people who use epiphytes as a garden feature, something I discovered at the exact moment I transformed into one of them.  According to my brain, the sin of gratuitous staghorn display is gravely compounded by the location of said epiphyte on any kind of artificial structure, including but not limited to fences, trellises, wooden mounting boards and hanging baskets.  As far as the Chelsea judges in my head are concerned, such epiphytic offenses are right up there with non-ironic use of garden gnomes, concrete kangaroos, or indeed any form of arboreal statuary.

So, obviously, this – garden design by guano – is unimpeachable:

But when bird-dropping inspired artlessness comes crashing down, what’s to be done?

Well…. this might pass at a push:

But this is just plain tacky, or so my inner hippie informed me just as I whacked in the last fencing pin:

The garden, begun with an earnest utilitarian intent, has strayed from the straight and narrow of food production.  First it was the bird baths, those gateway ornaments, a thin veneer of ecological functionality only partly disguising their real purpose, as a visual full stop in the fernery (“fernery”??!).  Then it was the native grasses: “to promote biodiversity”.  Huh.  We will turn silently away from the mosaic stepping stones.  Even the companion animals are becoming disturbingly decorative:

Clearly the shark was jumped long ago.  And to add insult to injury, this post has no political rationale either. No musings on death; no hot tips on organic gardening; not even a passing reference to climate change.  Utterly bereft of any skerrick of social utility.  Bugger it: I’m off to a garden centre for that replica of the Manneken Pis.