You have lots of beautiful flowers in your garden.
You have birds, butterflies, bees, frogs and toads to watch.
Now, you need seats, since one of the great benefits of having a garden is the opportunity to enjoy it.
Seats can be expensive, but they don’t have to be. They can range from a high-end bench to simple bales of straw. Look at second-hand stores or visit garage and estate sales, where you will likely find an old or rusty bench that you can paint or restore. You can also let loved ones know that you’d love a nice garden bench for your birthday!
The Seats in Serendipity Gardens
Serendipity Gardens has a dozen seats or sets of seats at various places in the garden. Here are a few of my favorites.
The swing and two chairs in the shade are my personal all-time favorite seating area. It’s nice in spring, summer and fall. During these seasons, we sit here more often than we sit anyplace else. Four people can gather here., plus a few more if they pull up extra chairs.
This swing is near the new herb spiral and a small water feature. It allows a view across the garden from a seat that is a good 10 degrees cooler than surrounding areas, thanks to the branches of the maple tree above. It is one of the prettiest areas in the spring, when the maple flowers along with hellebore and snowdrops. Small lights across the top of the swing make it a good night time seat as well.
The benches outside the fence and the straw bales around the firepit are great places for watching kids play on a dome-shaped climbing structure or for watching an impromptu tee-ball game. Hopefully, it will also be a good place from which to see the new wildflower garden. The straw bales around the firepit are a cheap alternative to more durable seating around the fire. They are nevertheless quite comfortable for a good-sized group — and they can also become mulch when it’s time to replace them.
The “bench in the middle” sits in the crossroads that two paths make in the central garden. I often rest there for a few minutes on the way from the vegetable garden to the compost pile. Made of bamboo, this bench provides a good view of the pond and waterfall in spring and fall. It offers a different but even better view in the summer. Then, monarda plants grow tall, attracting bees and butterflies galore. It’s a nice place to sit and listen to the hum as these pollinators do their work.
Two Adirondack chairs, painted green, sit near the pond. Shaded by an umbrella, these chairs offer the best view of the water and the fish and frogs that live there. We often sit here, too, just to watch the activity or feed the fish. When in these seats, you see the pond but not much else. Plants, including the giant leaves of Petasites japonicus and a willow that planted itself, encircle the area, making it feel like a hidden place. The other benefit of these seats is that they are near the waterfall in the pond and are a good place to listen to its mesmerizing noise.
A bench in the front yard that faces the garden gate is another one of my favorites. It allows a look toward the garden gate and all that lies beyond it as well as a view of the front garden from a different angle. It’s a glider that we purchased at a garage sale for $15 and then painted — something anyone needing a bench can do.
Finally, there are tables and chairs on the patio, where we celebrate various family events throughout the year — the usual holidays, plus quarterly birthday parties. It’s also a wonderful place to eat breakfast on a summer morning.
Sitting In the Garden
Each of these benches or seating areas serves a specific purpose in addition to the general purpose of just sitting not just near your garden, but actually in it. They are also located such that you have to walk through the garden to reach most of them. Being in the garden is an important thing to do, for many reasons. It’s a way to get to know your garden, to think about what it needs, to observe its wild inhabitants, and to simply enjoy the sweet-smelling ambiance that a garden provides.
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You can never have too many seats!