If Your Garden were Your House . . .
This week I got the answer.
"Outdoor gardening has become outdoor home decorating" according to Stan Pohmer of Pohmer Consulting Group.
In other words people aren't buying plants the way they used to. Now they are busy decorating the garden "rooms" that they have created back when gardening was the number one leisure time activity.
And many of us do have outdoor rooms. Of course many of them are a bit like efficiency apartments with the food area and living area all in one large space. But others have subdivided their yards into rooms for different types of activities. The well-divided garden may have a kitchen and food area, a utility room, a recreation room, and perhaps a living room or parlor - maybe even a bedroom.
Our yard is divided naturally into several different areas. Sometimes it's the result of a fairy abrupt change in the level of the terrain, and other times stands of old evergreen trees create a division between areas. Because of that, I reckon that we have all of the above. If I think of them as rooms like this I find that I think of them a bit differently than when I thought about them as just areas of the back yard. And that brings some interesting results. For one thing - if this is a "house" then I need to think about housecleaning.
Housekeeping Chores
I rather prefer outdoor housework to the indoor variety. If I leave the discarded weeds and deadheaded flowers on the floor long enough, they compost themselves and literally disappear. In fact I am fairly comfortable with just dropping things and leaving them on the floor to be dealt with in some vague future. Mother Nature does a lot of the cleaning for me, sometimes turning on her outdoor sprinkler system to save me the trouble of turning on the ones we installed ourselves. She sometimes turns on the vacuum as well - although instead of sucking up the debris it blows it away, depositing it in corners where it turns to rich compost without any effort on my part. All I need to do is clean up the human debris - like this mug.
Still, some areas of the exterior house are more in need of regular upkeep than others. Some of the more formal areas just won't look good unless kept tidy while others are clearly made for relaxing and letting go - and these can withstand a bit of clutter.
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