How to Protect Your Garden Monuments and Preserve Their Condition

Garden monuments add an attractive flourish to your garden, but if you want to keep them looking good for the long run, you need to take care to protect them from damage, dirt and the effects of aging. In addition to cleaning your monuments as recommended by the manufacturer, you should also protect them from wear and tear using the following tips.   

1. Do not position monuments directly under your eaves.

If you are placing your monument in a garden near the side of your home, make sure that you do not place it directly under the eaves. From there, perching birds may release their droppings onto the statues, but more importantly, if icicles tend to build up on your leaves in the winter, they could fall on your statutes and damage them. Similarly, if your gutters are leaking, the water droplets may hit your monuments, and if drops repeatedly hits the same spot, it may become pock marked.

2. Cover with natural materials as needed.

Occasionally, if there is a larger hail or snow storm forecast, you may want to protect your monuments from damage by covering them. Do not cover them with a plastic bin bag or a sheet of polyethylene. Because these materials do not breathe, condensation can build up underneath them ,and that moisture may hurt your monuments.

Instead, use a natural material. A wooden crate or even a wooden box built specifically for your monument works great. Alternatively, you can use a burlap sack.

3. Apply a coating of wax to monuments with metallic flourishes.

If you have a stone or ceramic monument with bits of metal on it, the metal may be prone to rusting, and the rust can spread about on your monument. To protect the monument, you can cover it with a coat of outdoor, weather-resistant paint, but if you don't want to change the colour of your monument or if you have an antique monument you want to protect, skip the paint, and cover it with a coat of wax instead.

4. Water your garden carefully.

Finally, to protect your monument from dirt, be careful about how you water your garden. Rather than using a sprinkler or a spray hose that may hit the soil and cause it to splash onto your monument, use a soaker hose. These hoses have small holes along them. You simply set them in your garden and turn them on as needed. Because the water basically seeps out of the hose and into the soil, you don't have to worry about splashing your monument.