An Englishman’s (English person’s, to be proper about it) home is his (her) castle: which makes an English man/person’s garden his, or her, castle grounds. Or something like that. What we mean is, the English garden is traditionally a haven of peace and tranquillity. A place where beauty and solitude combine. A place, in other words, that absolutely should not be infested by ugly great lumps of metal and plastic. Garden wooden storage is experiencing something of a renaissance, thank God, as people across the country realise that their one remaining retreat is blighted with water butts, compost bins and tool stores made of materials that just don’t fit with the ethos.
A garden is full of plants – which are made of wood and leaves. Wood, then, goes rather well as part of the whole ensemble. Plastic doesn’t. We all know how corny plastic garden furniture is, which is why we usually try and opt for wood – so why let the demon compound back in as storage? Garden wooden storage is the only way to fly, if you want your outside space to retain any uniformity at all: after all, in a place full of greens and flower heads, what looks more natural than wood?
One doesn’t use plastic when making fences, or sheds: and one doesn’t want a plastic decking area. Because it would look awful. As awful, in fact, as the vac-formed coffin-like monstrosity one uses to keep one’s compost bags in. Garden wooden storage, which can be as simple as a hinged chest located unobtrusively at the end of the garden, or tucked around the side of the house, offers a completely natural looking alternative. It can be lined with plastic, tin or aluminium if it’s being used to store compost – and treated with anti-weathering preparations to preserve its face. And, of course, it can be bought and made in the same wood as everything else in the garden – its fences, its sheds and its gazebos. Which means that garden wooden storage finally returns the missing ingredient to outside spaces across the country – the element of uniform design that used to make them gardens in the first place.
A garden is an external area that has been controlled in some way – designed – in order to create and preserve an overall effect. This is done with plants (“soft landscaping”) and non-organic (or in the case of wood, ex-organic) objects: hard landscaping. Garden wooden storage is the absent link in the process. Where everything else is carefully chosen to maintain the effect of the garden, storage tends to be bunged in, in all its hideous grey and green plastic “glory”, just because a person needs somewhere to keep her spades. Well, no more. Garden wooden storage is here, and it means all that grey and green nonsense can finally be consigned to the abyss in which it belongs. A bin: preferably one made of wood.
