Enhance Your Yard Or Flower Bed

There are several types of garden statue available that will enhance your yard or flower bed with a tastefully decorative touch. You can choose from several different sizes, shapes, materials for your statue depending on your taste and your budget. You may want the statue to be a focal point on which all the other landscaping depends, or you may just want something to give that finishing touch to its small corner. There are statues on bases, statues that hang, and statues that are simply set on the ground. When you are putting in a garden statue you will need to consider the size, the location, the material, the design and where you will buy it.

Resin Statue

A resin statue is very popular because it is virtually indestructible and can be created to look like almost any other material. It is really hard plastic that can be molded into nearly any shape and painted to look like metal, stone, or wood. It is also a lightweight garden statue and can be cleaned simply by cleaning with soap and water.

Concrete Or Cement Statue

Another fairly inexpensive type of statue is the concrete or cement statue. These statues can be left “as-is” or painted. They can be molded into any shape, but they will not have the fine detail of some of the other garden statue materials so they are often fairly large. They are relatively inexpensive when compared to the real stone statues. They are heavy and withstand the elements fairly well, but if they are hit or knocked over they can be broken.

Fiberglass Statue

A fiberglass statue is much like a resin garden statue. Fiberglass is another form of lightweight plastic and can be easily cleaned, but they are often smoother than the resin statues and shinier as well. You can also clean it easily with soap and water.

Metallic Statue

For a more unusual look you might want to get a metallic garden statue. They come in copper, brass, iron, bronze and other metals. Some are meant to retain their sheen over time while others begin to oxidize and get a patina of green, turquoise, or rust coloring.

Stone Statue

When you think of stone statues you may envision the Roman or Greek masterpieces, but you will find that you can find some that may be perfect for your yard as well. Simulated stone is an alternative for your garden statue that allows the artist to get more detail without as much room for error. The simulated stone is just as strong and durable as real stone. Marble is a real stone that has been used for centuries to make statues in palaces and the finer homes. Marble comes in several colors and is beautiful and elegant and will add a touch of class to any garden statue.

Style Your Garden

If you want a new look for your garden, there are statues that have a beautiful glass ball incorporated into some part of the garden statue, either hanging from a chain or a hook or resting in a base. Some of the glass balls are just clear, but others have an iridescent quality. They reflect the sunlight and are really very charming.

As far as style, you can choose the whimsical-like fairies or gnomes, or the more classic styles that look like something from Rodin or Michelangelo’s studio. There are modernistic forms filled with geometric shapes and straight lines. There are statues of children, animals, and almost anything you can think of. There is even a statue that fits right into the trunk of a tree that has an old gnome-like face, giving your tree a personality of its own.

Margarette Tustle writes ideas for home and family. Find statue resources for animal statues at dreamstatue.com

Most of us regard a sundial as an attractive ornament for a park or garden. Their effectiveness as time keepers is highly variable

That’s unfortunate, because it is not at all difficult to ensure that your garden sundial will be an accurate timepiece, provided, of course that the sun is shining.

But that will be covered in another article. For now, let’s see what a sundial is, and what it is capable of.

Sundial History

We forget in this modern age that accurate, affordable watches and clocks have been around for much less than 200 years.

Before then, sundials were one of the few ways to tell the time with reasonable accuracy.

Shadow clocks dated at 1500BC are known from Egypt, but the first dials appear to have been Babylonian. The Greeks adapted the idea, the Romans developed it further, and by about 100BC had perfected the horizontal sundial (and placed it in their gardens).

Even in ancient days some people had schedules to keep, and both agriculture and religion required knowledge of the seasons and the movement of the sun to determine planting and the timing of ceremonies.

The sundial was an important means of providing that information, and considerable advances in mathematics, geometry and astronomy were made while it was perfected. The knowledge gained forms part of the foundations of modern science.

Types of Sundial

There are four reasonably common types of sundial.

They all have two things in common. Each consists of a raised structure, called the gnomon (silent "g") which casts a shadow onto a plate called the dial. The dial is divided into hourly or shorter time divisions and may also show other information.The part of the gnomon whose shadow indicates the time on the dial is called the style.

The most abundant form is the horizontal sundial, happily sitting on its pedestal or column and adding beauty and interest to the home garden.

Related is the equatorial sundial, with its dial oriented at the same angle as the latitude. It works slightly differently, and is easier to use when properly calibrated.

Thirdly, there is the vertical sundial, ideally located on a wall facing due south in the northern hemisphere, and north in the southern hemisphere. The principle is much the same, but the sundial only occupies a semicircular area. Vertical sundials displayed the time to the public, and were used to correct unreliable public clocks.

And the most elegant of all, the portable sundial. George Washington had one - at that time pocket watches were most unreliable. Modern examples can be a work of art. They combine a compass with an adjustable dial. The dial is tilted to correspond to local latitude, and the compass defines north. Pretty neat!

Sundial Accuracy

A properly designed and installed sundial can be a very accurate means of telling the time, down to intervals of less than a minute.

I won’t go into the mathematics, but on a sundial 16 inches (40cm) in diameter, the shadow of the gnomon will move about 1/30th of an inch, or just under 1mm, in a minute. This may be small, it’s enough for our eyes to see.

Two Major Problems

Apart from the frequent absence of sunlight (Problem 1), all sundials show time by calibrating outwards from the position of the sun at noon. If you live east or west of me, your noon is different to mine.

Although the earth moves around the sun, we see it the other way. The sun appears to move from east to west across the sky, and local noon is when it’s vertically overhead. But if you live 100 miles west of me, my noon is still your late morning, and your noon is my early afternoon. This would be inconvenient if we used our sundials to arrange a lunch date, but a real problem if I had a plane to catch in another city.

Solar Time and Official Time

People managed to live with this problem until communications and transport became faster. Imagine calculating train timetables when Boston, New York and Buffalo all worked on different local times.

The answer was the development of local time zones. US Railways did this in 1883, but in 1914 the world’s governments agreed to divide the globe into 24 zones, each 15 degrees of longitude in width, and each one hour different in time to its neighbours. Boundaries were altered slightly to account for state and national borders.

There are four time zones in the contiguous 48 states of the USA: Eastern, centred on 75 degrees W longitude; Central, on 90 degrees; Mountain, on 105 degrees; and Pacific, on 120 degrees. Noon was identified astronomically for each of these meridians (now it’s done by atomic clocks), and accepted everywhere else in the zone.

Noon on sundials in places very close to these longitudes will correspond to official noon. For every degree east or west of the central meridian, for 7.5 degrees either side, you will need to add or subtract four minutes respectively to correct your sundial.

A few other adjustments are necessary to compensate for irregularities in the earth’s path around the sun - not too difficult to make but the theory is beyond this article.

They add to the inconvenience, and that’s why sundials have been superceded by more convenient and reliable forms of time keeping. But problems with time zones and orbital paths can be corrected, and there’s no reason why you can’t find the correct time from your sundial.

No reason, that is, provided it has been properly installed in your garden. And that’s the subject of another article.

Copyright 2005, Graham McClung.

A retired geologist, Graham McClung has had a lifelong interest in the outdoors. And where there’s outdoors there’s weather. He is the editor of http://Home-Weather-Stations-Guide.com, where you can find reviews and advice to help you choose and use your own home weather station. You can contact him by email at information@home-weather-stations-guide.com