New Use for a Broken Patio Chair

A couple years ago I discovered a beautiful blue morning glory (family Convolvulaceae, genus Ipomoea L.) growing in a most inconvenient spot in my backyard—practically in the middle of the yard, in a heavy traffic area.

I’m not sure how it managed to bloom (which is how I noticed it) between lawn mowings, but it did. Knowing that I would continue to mow it down, however, I dug it up and tried to make it grow onto a trellis I had found and stashed in my garage for just such an opportunity.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. In the heat of a Texas summer, the plant died and I eventually put the trellis back in the garage. Later I found another plant to grow on the trellis, and forgot all about the morning glory. Until the next year, when the beautiful blue flower bloomed in the middle of the yard again.

Once again I dug it up (more carefully, this time, I hoped) and planted it in a pot. As it began to thrive and bloom and overgrow the pot, I had realized I had to find something to do with it.

I searched the garage, looked at what my neighbors put out on garbage day, and wracked my brain trying to come up with something I could use for the morning glory to grow on, to no avail.

Finally, one day as I was doing something totally unrelated (as so often happens), my eyes fell on one of my patio chairs, and I remembered that it was broken and required a very gentle touch. You could sit on it, but it took a bit of finagling to get all the parts in the right place, and then you couldn’t move because the parts that that were no longer aligned/attached were easily moved, making the chair dangerous!

But as a makeshift trellis, this chair might just be perfect.

I folded the chair and leaned it against the back fence. I dug a hole in front of it, and emptied the pot of the morning glory into the hole.

In just a couple days I had trailers long enough to start weaving through the chair. But after a couple days I realized I didn’t really like the look of the folded chair, so I opened it up (and unfortunately broke off the vines), and placed it above the planted morning glory.

Once again, in a couple days I had trailers long enough to start feeding through the chair. I started in the seat portion of the chair, and now continue to weave each new one through as it grows long enough. Right now, all the trailers are coming through at pretty much the same place, so I’m trying to stretch them out and get more of the chair seat involved.

My hope at this point is that I’ll be able to control the growth of the vines on the chair—from the seat to the back, and over the arms—and achieve my vision, so that when the vines have grown and taken over completely, it will look like a living chair, rather than just a big mass of morning glory.

I don’t know whether this is possible, or if it is, if a living chair is something anyone (me) would want to have in their backyard. But it’s still early in the process, even if the vines are growing like crazy and I’m out there just about every day, poking them through the seat of the chair.

Either way, it’s a win: I kept anyone (again, me) from hurting themselves by sitting in a chair that was broken and doesn’t really function as a chair anymore; I kept something out of a landfill, and I saved myself from having to buy a trellis for the plant to grow on.

Oh, yeah, I also had fun, planning and carrying out this project, and turned it into an article as well.