outdoor dining

Built-in seating (table optional) can give a project a more formal, architectural look. It can also provide an architectural point of interest for luring guests outside. The orderliness and permanence of it contrasts nicely with plantings and other organic materials surrounding it.

Sean has designed and built seating fixtures for various Knibb Design projects over the years, some of which can be seen in this newsletters, here and here.)

Note the rough natural edge to the underside of both the table and the bench:

Constructions can offer a zen-like appearance to a garden as well, with their resolute lines, boundaries, and geometry. A built planter can also achieve this to a degree but seating adds the human component. By inviting us in it makes us another aspect of the garden of the garden itself.

For want of a garden a new view helps:

Whatever we think is the way to a more spiritually fulfilling life—no matter our tradition, culture, or inclination—most likely it will never be found behind a glowing screen.

In guru-speak, the outdoors is where humans first met God (in whatever that means). Our ancestors were taught in the outdoors and every culture has its tales of pilgrims and heroes meeting spiritual fulfillment there. Often, it was the deeper into the wild, the deeper the experience.

Even on the micro-world of our own own gardens, it can be a space where "we can restore our emotional and spiritual balance and nourish our senses and souls, away from the noise of everyday life." The garden is a facilitator.

Early gardens paid worship to gods and the dead. Gardens in Egypt were often found near tombs of the elite. It may've been the Romans who first secularized gardens and treated them as an extension of indoor space. It could be said that gardens engage all five of the human senses in a way few experiences do.

More than anything else a garden is a portal, a passage into another world, one of your own thoughts and your own making; it is whatever you want it to be and your what you want to be.

William Longgood

Green is the fresh emblem of well-founded hopes. In blue, the spirit can wander but in green it can rest.

Mary Webb

Some of the ideas in this post were found in The Spiritual Garden: Creating Sacred Space Outdoors by Peg Streep and John Glover.

The Serpentine Pavilion by architect Peter Zumthor at London's Kensington Gardens with interior garden designed by Piet Oudolf.

What's particularly interesting here is how the designers allowed the building to provide frame and backdrop with few details to distract from the dynamic centerpiece of the garden.

British garden designer Andrew Wilson describes what he believes sets landscape apart from architecture and why it's so important: It's "the garden's sensory uplift in experiential terms... The perfumes, the organic nature of things growing around us...." A garden is more than an intellectual experience, and if you want to get to the Dao of it, it's less as well. The garden represents the consequence of living things being nurtured and pampered and in the act of being within it allows us to share in that joy.

In the best circumstances, a garden is a setting for nature to feel its own bliss. In the Pavilion garden sun, sky, air, and nature all join together in a chorus of smiles. A plant by it's very character is a monument to hope: Always reaching optimistically toward the sun.

The Pavillion from the outside.

The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. Hanna Rion

Making the case for a post-turf California is nothing new, but the chorus has been steadily swelling. (A few of the more vocal members we've featured here are John Greenlee, James Hitchmough, and Piet Oudolf.)

Among them are the authors of the newly published Reimagining the California Lawn (where some of these images were taken). The authors add yet another resource for suggestions on lawn alternatives both practical and edible. Another advocate, designer, educator, and anti-lawn and edible landscape activist Fritz Haeg, reminds us that there were no lawns in Eden either.

Despite a lawn's prodigious use of water (the average lawn gulps about 88 gallons a day) and demands of time and resources for care and maintenance, lawns are practically useless. According to a 2007 UCLA study, the use of our yards, back or front, as a locus for recreation is a fantasy. Both children and their parents are staying inside more. Lawns are a poor investment and, especially in Southern California, no longer sustainable.

From a design aspect, it's even possible to view lawns as a kind of yoke. When landscapes are liberated, a new variety of new possibilities appear: The meadow, the jungle, the desert, the productive garden, etc.

Al fresco refreshed.

The Halley 4150 by Spanish designers Jordi Vilardell & Meritxell Vidal.