I have the perfect garden shed. I did not design it myself so I can praise its perfection; I stole the design from Fletcher Steele who gets full credit. The design appears inside the front and back covers of the 2011 reprint of Fletcher Steele’s Design in the Little Garden (1924). A modular design, it is a mere 21” deep and can be a long as you need it to be. In the drawing it is beautifully planned with cunning little hooks and shelves to satisfy even the most compulsively organized among us.
Although I have a cellar for a cumbersome assortment of furniture, plant stands, pots and hoses I still need a handy place for tools. To assess my ground-level needs I moved all my tools to the trunk of the car, and then eliminated all the non-essentials. Once completed, you need much less than you had previously thought.
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| The Fletcher Steele Drawings |
My shed was built by Brian Tamm and Dan Frank, who build everything for me. It fits flush against the side of the house, the roofline of the shed following the roofline of the house. Its function is almost invisible. When I asked my son to store a pot in the garden shed he walked out the door, looked around, and asked me where it was.
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| The Finished Shed |
Before I came across the Fletcher Steele design, I looked at shed kits in every conceivable style, from configurations for cozy cabins with window boxes, to Zen retreats, to cabanas with Palladian gables. There were hip-roofed styles recommended for California vineyards, austere slant-roofed sheds for tool minimalists, sheds with faux-Tudor rooflines, and five-sided numbers with French doors.
Although I was governed by the need for a shed, in my heart what I really wanted was a garden room. Historically, there have always been structures in the garden, from the simplest arbors to the most elaborate marble sleeping platform in hot climates. Tents with hangings, summerhouses, gazebos and trellised pavilions have all had their place in gardens. In some regions garden rooms are linked to a greenhouse, conservatory, or solarium. In other regions, it always means a screened porch as you couldn’t live outdoors without one.
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| A Perfect Garden House |
I have visited winter gardens, lathe and glass additions used primarily for the cultivation of tropical plants but with plenty of space for chairs and tables, houses with old stone barns or outbuildings turned into garden rooms, painting studios or summer dining rooms that can only be called garden rooms because they looked out on the garden. I’ve rocked on long porches that are garden rooms because of the comfort from which you contemplate the garden.
A passionate gardener’s garden room always has a point of view. It may be facing a fragrant evening garden rich in heliotrope, nicotiana, Casablanca lilies and daturas. It may be no more than a potting shed, with space for a table, pots, barrels of soil, and running water. Painters might arrange their studio to open on to the garden while writers may have a shed at the bottom of the garden (Virginia Wolfe here), all keeping clippers nearby for a few spare moments of deadheading.
Some of the prettiest garden rooms may be found in garden-less apartments. The tenants are invariably displaced gardeners forcibly removed from their gardens or relocated by circumstance to a flower-less world. These rooms are often filled with wicker, flowered chintzes, airy curtains and potted plants. The effect of ease and charm is not appreciably different from what you would have found in their lost gardens.
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| Sunroom in a New York City Apartment |
At some unremembered moment I gave up the fantasy of a garden room and settled on a shed that would be no more than a repository for tools and bags of fertilizer. All gardeners know that the accumulation of tools grows faster than the growth rate of plants, but I am practicing the moderation of which I know I am secretly capable. Just this year alone I’ve cancelled orders for a fine left-handed knife, a hand rake, several pairs of heavy-duty gloves, an extra trowel or two, and new clippers.
But delusions of grandeur die hard. My perfect shed is located in the former trash yard, the home of rakes and shovels, garbage cans and trash bins. I decided to turn it into a piazzetta, a place for tropical and tender plants unsuited to my deeply-shaded Zone 5 backyard. Up went fences for screening the driveway. Up went an enclosure to obscure the trash cans, now reduced in size from the largest to "single occupancy household." Concrete was jack-hammered, removed, and replaced with pink crushed granite, located in only one quarry in Connecticut.
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| The Former Trash Yard |
Last year on the piazetta I looked after only a few tender plants and annuals in small pots. This year I am looking for the alamanda and adenium I saw wintering over indoors in Arizona. You can see where this is heading.
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| The Piazetta 2018 |
