Cell phone towers: They’re a necessary part of today’s world, keeping us all connected and able to access trivia book publishers’ blogs whenever we like. But they’re also an eyesore. Fortunately, some designers out there are doing their best to disguise cell towers as things a bit more pleasing to the eye.

Cacti

In the deserts outside of Tucson, Arizona, cell phone towers are being hidden inside 20-foot-tall fake cacti.

Palm Trees

In Florida, those huge palm trees that tower over homes may not all be palm trees. A lot of them are niftily disguised cell towers.

Flag Pole

College Station, Texas, is the home of Texas A&M University. It also has a 89-foot-tall flagpole prominently displaying the American flag…and doing double-duty because that pole is also carrying cellular phone calls.

Water Tower

The city of Oakley, California is home to an old-fashioned wooden water tower. Except it’s none of those things: It’s a 64-foot-tall cell phone tower.

Trees

There’s a grove of trees behind a strip mall in northeastern Atlanta. While the cell phone tower disguised as a tree is supposed to blend in, what with its many realistically rendered branches and needles, it doesn’t quite disappear into the forest. That’s because it’s about twice as tall as the surrounding (real) trees.

Windmill

A cell phone provider in Oregon was tasked with installing a tower in a field near an elementary school, and as such considered masking it as a massive pencil. Instead, the company decided to go with a windmill, because the field used to be a farm. (It’s not actually a functioning windmill—it just looks like one.)

Church Bells

“Can you hear me now?” The bell tower at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in Dallas, Texas, is outfitted with church bells, and it’s also a cell phone pole.

Brick Wall

Rather than mask a cell phone tower in Sopot, Poland, a cell provider contracted to run one up the side of a church, and then carefully painted it to perfectly blend in with the old church’s brick exterior.