Fed up with keeping your tools and seeds in some kind of metal or plastic contraption that looks like it ought to be buried in earth? Disappointed with the way a compost bin manages to make your entire garden look like a rubbish dump? Ditch the modern materials and get with wood. A wooden storage box is movable, natural looking and a whole lot less ugly than any of the alternatives: and it can be made in wood of a colour to match your existing garden furniture.
Why people ever started using plastic storage items in gardens is a mystery. Plastic has never looked anything other than urban; utilitarian: basically, either cheap, fake or just plain out of place. Wood is a natural part of the garden’s materials: it’s what trees are made of, and it’s what most hard landscape materials (hard landscaping refers to any part of a garden that is there by design, but isn’t organic) are based on. A wooden storage box, then, is the perfect way to keep everything one has to have, in order to run a garden successfully, in great shape – without losing the feel of the garden one is using those things to maintain.
When you think about it like that, using any other material for garden storage just seems a bit daft. A garden, after all, is a place where people try and impose some kind of ordered tranquillity – a harmony of plants, wood and open space. So why interrupt all that with a whacking great plastic monstrosity? When it gets hot, plastic storage bins of all sizes smell like dustbins: and when it rains they go mouldy. A wooden storage box smells like nature, whether it’s the nature of a Swedish forest or the comforting old smell of a shed. And it can be treated with varnish or some kind of stain to retard the ageing effects of the good old British weather. You can’t say that about even the flashiest plastic compost bin, which simply collects algae in all its moulded nooks and crannies until it ends up harbouring more unwelcome bacteria than a Bombay slum.
That, alone, ought to be enough to banish plastic (and metal, which rusts and gets full of holes) from the garden for good. If it still hasn’t swayed, think about this. A wooden storage box can be built for purpose, to fit any size and shape of space – not to mention any kind of use. Plastic and metal containers have to be bought pre-formed, which means you mostly end up making do rather than purchasing something that actually works in your garden. Which you really don’t have to do. Ditch the modern materials, get a wooden storage box and come back to nature – you won’t regret it for a second.
