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Pretend Gardens: Indoor Hints for the Garden-Deprived

© Carol Wallace

Welcome to my garden. Come in and have a seat. I realize it's not exactly the garden you were expecting, but it is winter, and snowing outside. And, knowing as I do (all too well) that gardeners really hate that moment in fall when the last tool has been cleaned and put away, the last mulch spread, and it's time to come in for winter, I've done my best to make the indoors seem as much like a garden as possible.

The room in this photo was a natural for a garden room, as it came with two walls of windows and a floor tiled in a deep forest green. Unfortunately, it also has a northern exposure, which doesn't make it ideal for many plants. Right now, it holds three huge brugmansias, two crinum, a freesia and assorted houseplants anyway, as my house doesn't have all that many good windows. With the rattan furniture and a concrete garden bench used as a coffee table it does feel a bit like being in a garden.

Any room can be a garden. Take my dining room. When we moved in, it looked a lot like a cave. Gorgeous wallpaper, but magnolias floating on a charcoal gray background don't help the lighting situation when the room is 25 feet long with only one widow at the far end. The solution? Make it a gazebo! We started with a nice picture of a garden and an overhead projector. I projected that picture onto the lower walls, penciled it in, then painted a garden of spring flowers. Next we made a shallow lattice railing in front of it, all around the room. Uprights go to almost to the ceiling, and are decorated with some beautiful cast iron brackets we found in a shop in New Orleans. At the end of the room with the window we have a New Orleans park bench (I wonder why we're never attracted to small souvenirs?) flanked by huge potted plants and a garden statue on a pedestal. Tucked in another corner is a small fountain (which my cats think of as their own private drinking bowl) and a lamp we found in Paris, which looks like a 5' tall cattail plant. (See what I mean about small souvenirs? We had to buy that lamp a ticket on the Metro!) Any day now I'm planning on painting clouds in the area above the lattice -- as soon as I learn to paint convincing looking clouds. Sometimes I wish I could do my walls using Photoshop intead of my trusty sea sponge.