With lockdowns continuing in Melbourne I had to resort to an outdoor Halloween, a very different prospect when I normally start transforming the interior of my house weeks in advance of All Hallows Eve.

I hope you enjoy my outdoor Cemetery, which was a lot of fun to make.

Enjoy, Julie

The feature of the cemetery was a large wicker man walking through the central pathway, he sent rats running and awoke the dead from their graves.

The cemetery included many of my ghouls, skeletons, body parts, spiders and borders.

The boarder was constructed with lots of dead tree branches and spider web, this provided a boundary for the cemetery and defined the space.

The cemetery looked quite different once evening descended, my skeletons and their pet dog enjoyed the evening from a bench seat

At night, with the wind increasing and the animated ghouls talking, the cemetery became quite scary.

We used a lot of tomb stones and animated human and non human skeletons.

How to make a Wicker man

I made the wicker man using three metal cone shaped trellises from the local garden shop. Two formed the legs and the third was locked into the centre using cable ties.

I did save a number of large branches for the wicker man, these were threaded through the structure and locked or wedged into shape, longer branches were used for the arms.

I was originally going to use a pumpkin head for the wicker man but felt he did not look evil enough and changed his head to an animated talking tree. Remember to use tent pegs to secure the structure in the ground. After Halloween we moved the wicker man to a garden bed and he still looks good, in fact he is ageing well over time.

This year was not the halloween we expected but it was a lot of fun creating an outdoor halloween space and the cemetery really worked well to this end.

I trust you enjoy

Julie