Garden Seating

Before you take a seat to read what I have to say about garden seating, or rather what Dorothy Giles has to say about garden seating, I want to assure you that this picture is not recent. I’m not sure what year I took it, but when I went looking for a picture of these two chairs, this picture popped up.

“Good enough,” I said to myself. It shows that these chairs are made of a material that can withstand all the weather that can be thrown at them. Those chairs have been there for about 12 years, give or take. The only time they’ve been moved since I plopped them there was when one of the guys trimming trees moved one of them out of the way when he cut back smokebush trees behind them.

(When I cut back the smokebushes myself several years ago, I just drug the branches over the chairs and the chairs weren’t scratched, knicked, marred or otherwise damaged in any way. They are tough chairs.)

Anyway, back to Dorothy Giles, one of those lost ladies of garden writing. In her book, The Kitchen Garden (1926), she has a chapter titled “Luxuries That Are Also Necessities.”

Guess which necessary luxury she talks about first?

If you answered “garden seating,” you are the best, smartest reader!

“A good bench is chief of these, because, clearly, the gardener cannot actively garden all of the time. She or he will want to meditate, too.”

She goes on to describe how pleasant sitting in the garden is!

“And what is so pleasant as to take one’s well-earned ease in the garden in the cool of the day, watching the long shadow-fingers reach across the grass, while from flower borders and herb rows rises the “incense of the evening sacrifice,” the sweet-smelling savor of mignonette and nicotiana and the shy matthiola, which is still the most fragrant of them all, and, from the well-trimmed rows, the musky, honey-sweet perfume of ripe red raspberries, with dew on them?”

If that doesn’t make you want to find a good seat in your garden, perhaps it has just added to your “to grow” list?

But more importantly, seating in the garden, according to Dorothy serves another important purpose.

“One cannot come to terms of real intimacy with a garden that one sees only in transit, as it were, on the way from one task to another. One needs must live in one’s garden to know it—yes, and take time to be idle in it too; to watch and listen and consider, while the green business of the year goes on all around.”

Yes, we must watch, listen, and consider, while seated!

Dorothy then went on to suggest the best seating was comfortable and had a sloped seat, so water would run off it after the rain. She would also preferred a bench or seat that concealed a hidden compartment where she could keep “gardening gloves, scissors, a trowel, a ball of twine, and a packet of strong wire hairpins.”

(I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve never once been out in my garden and wished I’d had a packet of strong wire hairpins nearby.)

She was not in favor of tiny little iron chairs—you know the ones—that invite no one to sit a spell. Nor did she approve of those made of untreated wood, which would quickly rot. She preferred white or green but once saw one that was a robin’s egg blue that she admired.

I will confess I did buy two old metal chairs and a table at a local antique mall a couple of years ago. They are not iron, but are fairly small. I painted them orange, for no particular reason other than it was a color. (Carol, didn’t your grandmother have orange chairs in her kitchen? Maybe that’s why you chose orange.”)

I put them by the gate to the Vegetable Garden Cathedral, but they have never been good for sitting, just for sitting stuff on.

Which is why the other day I ordered a “luxury that is a necessity,” a new green chair for the vegetable garden that will be for sitting—for watching, listening, and considering. And resting, of course. It’s made of the same material as those lime-green chairs, but isn’t as big, so I can move it around the garden to watch, listen, and consider from different viewpoints.

I think Dorothy would approve!

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