">HomeOwnerNut

I’m just a fuddy-duddy. Give me a couple of carved pumpkins, a weak porch light, and I’m fully decked out to scare the kiddies. But I understand the need to outdo your neighbor when it comes to demonstrating your willingness to go overboard for the holidays of your choice.

I personally like to spiff up the house for Bruce Springsteen’s Birthday (September 23), Hug an Australian Day (April 26), King Kamehameha I Day (June 11), Watergate Day (June 17), and my favorite, National Pancake Day (September 26). But I realize a lot of readers love Halloween more, so here are some pictorial ideas to spook your imagination:

D.B. Cooper

This battery powered skull and bones set commemorates Halloween and, at the same time, the exploits of Cooper, who leaped from a Boeing 727 with $200,000 in a briefcase on November 24, 1971.

Hungry Heart

Speaking of Springsteen (everybody’s got a hungry heart), or Lord Tennyson (always roaming with a hungry heart), this appetizing tabletop Halloween decoration ought to get your guests a-bobbing for apples. Lay your money down and play your part.

Stormin’ Norman

“Gee, I’m sorry I didn’t hear you in all this rain.”  Come on in. Take a shower. I think you’ll find these bath towels extremely fluffy and absorbent.

Pity Potter

Outdoor Urbanite has a nice presentation of this literary theme and other decorations I know you can’t live without.

Frighty Night Lights

Ok, you can outdo the neighbors, right?  Take your best shot outdoing this family!

Gnome Body Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen

I already took my digs at garden gnomes, so I’ll leave you to your own commentary on this grand prize costume from Inhabitots.

Take the Halloween challenge:

1. Post links to your own favorite decorations, or

2. Find another blog that mentions Tennyson, Springsteen, and D.B. Cooper, along with actual Hitchcock movie dialogue in a single post.

My trusty friend Erin is a USDA Research Ecologist, which means she studies the “evolutionary dynamics of weed invasions”.  She wanders the land mapping the outburst of nature as it renews itself in its sundry shapes, sizes, and colonies. In thinking of her this Halloween season, I felt it necessary to observe some unusual plants that have found their way into many a state-side garden. Feel free to plant, water, prune, and sniff as necessary.

Smells Like Halloween Perfume

The poor Rafflesia–more commonly called “a stinking corpse lily”–is on the endangered list in native Southeast Asia. People in the United States have grown them in their yards. The blossoms can weigh 25 pounds and smell a little like decomposing flesh, hence the plant’s nickname. Trick or treat!

Go Ape!

Monkey cups made The Daily Telegraph Top-Ten Ugliest Plant list. The chimplantzee grows a perfectly natural sac for carrying your Halloween candy!

Bugle Corpse

The corpse (or carrion) flower is known as an aphrodisiac, but you may have to wait six years between blooms. (Sounds a lot like life to me.)  But this gorgeous, alien-looking plant does live 40 years and the blooms last for three days.

Nipped in the Bud

The South American Cow’s Udder (or nipple plant) is related to the tomato, but is poisonous to humans.  Will Barnes has great images of a number of udderly delightful earthly gems.

Meet the Beetles

Africa’s parasitic Hydnora smells foul to us, but its budding flower attracts swarms of carrion beetles.  The surprise is on them. The beetles drop down the hatch into the anthers where they’re coated in pollen, then they descend the rest of the way down where they fertilize the plant. The fruit itself has 20,000 tiny seeds which are eaten by baboons, moles, and porcupines who then tote them around Africa, dropping them nether-wards everywhere to grow anew. I did not make this up.

Talk to the Hand

Actually, you should meditate on the hand–the Buddha’s Hand.  The flower is on Chicago Now’s list of ugly plants, but I find it quite sufficient in the freeing of earthly attachments. And, like all good things for Halloween, it’s edible!