Grow your love with Forest in a Bottle! Tree lore and a cheap, elegant gift idea.

In several cultural traditions it has been said that planting a tree when you get married will insure your love will grow with it. (You think, "so that's why I'm divorced!" No, but seriously...) In fact, there is a lot of folklore surrounding trees, as you can imagine. Apple trees, Maple and Willow trees are well known for their love powers! So when you tie the knot, why not ensure that everybody that attends the reception gets these wedding favors, plants their own forest, and before long, your love has created an ecosystem! That should make you super,duper,wooper lucky in love, right?

Well, maybe except for a few obstacles. First of all, I can just imagine how many of these little bottles will be left right on the reception table :-(  Then, where exactly is anybody going to plant a forest? If you live in an apartment, forget it. Even if you have a decent-sized backyard, there is always those crazy, no life, stick-in-the-butt neighbors who will complain about your love forest in ten years. If you can think of anywhere that you can grow a forest and get away with it, order these now! We need the forests!

Even if all your guests take these babies with them, the bottles themselves are more than likely going to; (a.) spend a few weeks rolling around the floor of their car, and (b.) spend untold weeks rolling around in the junk drawer. Still, I love this idea. At about three bucks a pop, it's not the most outrageous I've seen for wedding favors either.

So I wonder what I would do if I received such a thoughtful (and labor intensive) gift if I lived in an urban setting. I think I would get some pots and soil and grow the seeds into saplings on the windowsill or something. Then I would give them as gifts to people and help them plant their trees. The more trees the better. If I was going to give these bottles as a favor however, I would definitely get better labels. Those ones featured on the bottles are tacky! You can also have place cards with seeds in them printed up by the same company. Great idea still, but the printing is also tacky!

 Another great idea along these lines for any kind of elegant party favor, is to get some tree seeds, and grow them into small saplings (of course, this will have to be planned in advance). Put some natural-like burlap material to cover the pots and tie a shimmery ribbon around the pot. If the sapling is tall enough, you could wrap white battery-operated lights around the little tree. Add a little parchment name card of who the tree is for with a gold marker pen in fancy writing. Graceful, chic, stylish and inexpensive. I bet those beauties won't get left on the reception table.

Whatever the tree gifts are for, make sure you match the tree with its' "special qualities". Who knows what magic you might produce? Also, here is the link below for the bottled forest products.

http://bottledforests.com/Products.html