Front door forever decorations

Imagine a slideshow of all the plants I have killed over the years. It's long. The plants are brown, dry and ugly.

At my front door I especially have a problem. The mid morning sun blasts my front door and with the Californian heat and my lacking remember-to-water-skills, that is a recipe for disaster.

So I thought I would try this new strategy out. Fake Forever plants.



Have you seen all the lovely forever plants that IKEA started carrying? They are extremely realistic looking. None of that silk fabric trying to look like a leaf and fooling exactly no-one. They are instead going the plastic route and on the ones that are particularly fooling to the eye, they have dusted them with some kind of fairy green dust to make them even more realistic looking.

Here is what I did.

I gathered these supplies.



I used a couple of rocks (1 pictured), four Fejka plants from IKEA, some packaging tape and a bird on a stake. You would usually use it to stake into the ground to position your watering hose on the lawn. (I have never seen anyone doing that, but that is what the packaging showed. I just saw a cute bird!) I thought I was also going to use the black empty pot to have something to set the plants on, but it turned out I just used the rocks and that was fine.






I taped my pots together like this.



And this.



Unscrewed the stake from the bird. If you use a real plant, you can just leave the stake on of course. But I had rocks where the stake would go.



I put the bird in the center of the four plants and set them into the container.



Earlier I had made an equally fake forever succulent like this:



I added some moss to it as well.



The lantern is also from IKEA. I took out the metal candle holder thingy with pliers. Again because I get such a blast of sun a candle there just melts and looks awful pretty quickly, so instead I have used a glass votive holder - also from IKEA - with a tea light inside it - also from.... are you sensing a theme here?

So there you have it. A bit of greenery, no green thumb necessary The succulent has already been outside since April this year. (I know, I am a fast poster) and it has not faded much as you can see.

What do you think? Are you opposed to using fake plants outside? fake plants period? I have learned to love them ...