Garden seating isn't just about furniture. Garden seating goes right to the heart of our garde,n and it makes a big difference to how good your garden looks. I've got 30 great ideas here and some of them you'll be able to do with the garden furniture you already have, so stay tuned.
Now garden seating can be a focal point in your garden - it can be almost a piece of sculpture, it can be a piece of art, it can provide a punctuation point in a big bed - if there are just lots and lots of flowers and greenery and it just all looks a bit muddled, a bench in the middle or at the edge can make a big difference.
A garden seating area can be a place to create privacy in your garden or, of course, it can be a place where you entertain family and friends. You don't always have to spend a lot of money to get gorgeous garden furniture, and you can buy your garden furniture secondhand.
We bought four garden chairs, which we love, from a Depot Vente in the South of France - that's a secondhand warehouse - but of course, we put them on the top of the car and drove back up to England. And that will have cost us quite a lot in petrol because the chairs dragged against the wind while driving up the motorway. My mother bought lots of garden chairs from auctions in the 1970s and I still have some of them, but every now and then we need to repair them or indeed to replace them, so even with secondhand furniture, you've always got some costs.
One friend of mine the garden writer Francine Raymond has a theme for her garden which is yellow and gra,y and she gets furniture and pots and everything from all over - from secondhand places but also from chain stores.
And she paints everything either yellow or grey because her house roof is grey slate and her house is yellow brick. And it really does look very stylish - another friend of mine Wenche, is Norwegian and she has a really lovely Scandinavian look to her garden. She uses something called Wet & Forgets on her garden furniture and it gives it a sort of faded bleached Nordic look. It's actually cleaner than paint. And if you're thinking of colours - think about the colour of your planting.
I simply love these benches from tuinmeubel Centrum , where the pale blue echoes that the flowers behind. I think it looks so pretty. Even if you have really quite a standard garden bench, paint can turn it into something quite different like this stripey candy-striped garden bench here in one of the Whitstable Open Gardens. It's a lovely red and orange and it completely matches the planting in front of it.
I just simply love Sussex Prairie gardens in Sussex which is a government that has benches all over and wonderful prairie planting and it really does match the planting to the benches. You can also build in garden seating, and my friend garden designer Charlotte Rowe has a very small courtyard garden, but she can actually have really a dozen or so people out there for a party very comfortably because the edge of her beds is also seating. It's built-in concrete - the broad-edged to her raised beds look very stylish.
When there's no-one in the garden it looks just like raised beds, but when we're all in there we can all sit on on the edges and really enjoy ourselves very comfortable. Another thing you can do is to think about the architecture of your house and what sort of garden furniture would suit that. The salutation is a Lutyens building and it has Lutyens benches in the garden - and of course not many of us are going to be that privileged but even so Lutyens benches look gorgeous in any garden.
Lutyens himself was designing around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Perhaps one of the most important things about garden furniture is using it as a focal point. Now if you have a great big garden of course then a bench in the distance down the long avenue of trees is absolutely beautiful, but most of us don't have that sort of garden. But even if you've got a very small courtyard garden, like my friend Amanda, remember that a bench can be an ideal focal point, and in her case, hers is also quite sculptural and indeed it's purple.
She can see it in the winter - she glass wall to her house and so she sees this bench year-in-year-out. If your garden is broken up into 'areas' then benches and seating make a great focal point, so it's really worth thinking about having several around the garden. My friend Lucie who lives at Pheasant Farm, which is open for the NGS by appointment, has a circular lawn and she has a lovely bench just being a focal point for that, and also another one providing punctuation in front of a bed of flowers.
I have a stone bench in front of a bed of flowers and I just think it makes a little bit of difference to have that tiny bit of stone there rather than simply just having the wonderful flowers and foliage. Another sculptural bench is this one it's lovely curved and beautiful and metallic and it's tucked away in a private corner of a private garden. Now you could very happily perch on this and have a drink or you could just look at it because it looks gorgeous.
So what about benches for storage? Well, of course, you could have a built-in bench for storage - it would look very smart like this by AZ Landscapes which I saw at BBC Gardeners World Live or you can just stuff things under the bench, and arrange them neatly and actually even that looks very good. And I particularly love garden designer Charlotte Rowe's log storage underneath her bench. There are more ideas for benches and seating - I really rather like this metal cage with stones in it I first saw something like this holding up the seafront at Seasalter, but it actually looks rather stunning and it was in a garden at Hampton Court Flower Show.
Then I just adore these quirky horse benches from the roof garden of the Ham House Hotel in London. My brother Hugo and his wife Anna made decking out of railway sleepers for their courtyard garden and they had a little bit leftover so they made this bench. and it's a lovely focal point. You can have mismatched chairs all these are vintage chairs, but they are all they all have some pink in them so think of a theme to pull them together or you can have matching chairs like these at the Ascot Garden Show.
Even quite minimalist chairs work well - these are very hard-wearing plastic chairs that you can scrub down and they don't have arms and they're quite flat, so you can really tuck them right under the table and they're from the garden of Dan Cooper who writes The Frustrated Gardener blog.
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