The Garden as Home

There's a distinction worth making between the garden as an extension of your house and the garden as part of your home. They sound similar but they're fundamentally different ideas.

The house extension approach gives us rendered walls, porcelain slabs, minimal planting in raised beds, maybe some fake grass. The aim is to create another room, just one that happens to be outside. It should look finished from day one and stay that way. No mess, no maintenance beyond the occasional jet wash, nothing out of place. It's architecture.

The problem is that gardens aren't architecture. They're living systems, and living systems change. They grow old, they adapt, they surprise you. A garden that can't do these things isn't really a garden at all, it's an outdoor floor plan.

When you design the garden as part of your home rather than as another room, you're acknowledging that it needs to accommodate life in all its forms. Not just your life, but the lives of everything that will inhabit it. The hedge that thickens over fifteen years. The stone that weathers and softens. The volunteer seedlings that appear in the gravel. The pond that matures into something you didn't quite plan but wouldn't change.

This matters because the outdoor room creates a particular relationship with the space. You become its maintenance manager, constantly working against natural processes. The render needs cleaning, the grouting needs redoing, the fake grass eventually needs replacing. You're fighting decay, fighting change, fighting the very thing that makes a garden alive.

In a garden that's home, you're doing something different. You're participating in change rather than preventing it. You're watching the hazel grow, responding to where the birds nest, noticing which plants seed themselves about and deciding whether to keep them. The work is attention rather than control.

Children understand this instinctively. They don't play on perfect lawns or around pristine planters. They play where things are happening. Long grass to hide in, pond edges to crouch beside, trees to climb, spaces that tolerate their chaos. The outdoor room is fundamentally hostile to the mess and energy of actual childhood.

There's also the question of what we leave behind. An outdoor room can't really be inherited. Porcelain and render don't carry memory. They might last physically, but they don't tell stories or hold time in the way an old stone wall does, or a mature hedge planted by someone who won't see it reach full height. When nothing can age, nothing can be passed down with meaning.

I think some of this comes from a fear of imperfection, of things not looking as they did on the day they were finished. We've become uncomfortable with patina, with the soft edges that come with age, with plants behaving like plants rather than like permanent fixtures. The outdoor room promises to solve this discomfort by simply removing time from the equation.

But time is what makes a garden a home. The relationship that develops over years, the knowledge of how it changes through seasons, the unexpected things that arrive and settle in. You can't have that with materials chosen specifically because they won't change.

This isn't about convincing people who want the outdoor room. Some people genuinely want that static completion, and that's fine. But if you're someone who senses something missing in that approach, if the idea of a garden that can't grow old feels somehow wrong, then perhaps what you're looking for isn't another room at all.

You're looking for home.