Paint and the Pursuit of Tackiness.

Our head gardener at the Village Green - the hard working Jon, recently painted a few of our dried alliums in the Children's Garden. I had done this years before up at a previous job (a lifetime ago) and got some very interesting reactions. Although most people thought it was fabulous, a few were taken aback and a couple were outright offended. One gentleman asked me where I had found the wonderous red alliums in the garden yonder.
"I painted them", I replied.
"You can't do that," he blustered. "It's not fair."
Fair? Sorry Bub, but all is fair in love and creativity.
I have a far away friend, Cleo, who has the most outrageous red hair I have ever seen. I knew her for years before we had a discussion about our family trees. She told me her grandmother was from Ireland.
"Oh, that must be where you get your red hair", I chimed.
"No", she replied, "I get my red hair from Loreal."
While I stood there agape, she educated me to the fact that in the pursuit of creativity it is not only our perogative, but also our duty to cheat. Paint the sun blue, make a sculpture out of toilet paper, paint the plants in your garden. Just because it hasn't been done before makes it all the better.
So we have multicolored Allium schubertii in the Children's Garden. This fall, I'll bring them in, paint them white, dazzle them with glass glitter and use them as the toppers on our Christmas trees. Is that cheating? Who made the rules? ARE there really any rules?
So my question for you today is "When was the last time you played with a can of spray paint?

PS. Today I was musing over the insipid pink hydrangea nigra in the Widow's Walk. Last year I had Jon cut off all their heads. I'm after the black stems and pink does not belong in a garden of black, purple and acid green. But after the go at the alliums, I decided "why not paint the hydranges too?" So here's Allie (Jon's Sweetheart and Gardener Extraordinaire) painting the hydrangeas black.