The greenhouse was up before anything else was finished. Six months into what would turn out to be a year-long home renovation project, I was desperate to step away from paint choices and start growing.
Moving house had largely been driven by an admission that other people’s gardens weren’t enough. That even though as a landscape designer I made gardens for a living, I really did want one of my own and I didn’t just want to design it, I wanted to actively grow it. For too long I had lived vicariously through my designs, the pages of reference books and the downloads of search engines. My knowledge of plants, how to nurture them and how to combine them in a pleasing scheme was ever growing, but my practical experience had stultified - restricted by a tiny courtyard, there is only so much you can do.
It’s not that I didn’t grow things; peas, beans, courgettes, chard and spinach were periodic staples - basically anything that could be grown in pots or squeezed into the small amount of earth I had access to. Seedlings were brought on in plastic propagators as soon as it was warm enough, a lack of sunny window cills limiting any early germination that could be done indoors. Always, dreaming of a greenhouse.
As a child I had been bewitched by my Aunt Angela’s metal frame version. If we were playing hide and seek, you could always find me, munching on strawberries and tucked behind the cucumbers that were draped from corner to corner. Not very well hidden in my little vegetable fruit jungle, intoxicated by the smell I would trace the shafts of light as they burst through the glass and exposed the raindrop stains on the window panes. A happy place.
In our old house, a simple victorian terrace cottage, I had entertained fantasies of building a glasshouse lean-to to the extend the kitchen, so we could pick produce and cook it with one easy stretch of the arm. Of course, in reality I knew that wouldn’t work - we’re not meant to live in hothouses.
That said, when we finally took the plunge and moved, an archytypal greenhouse design with metal framed rectangle windows, marching in uniformity, would end up being my inspiration for the kitchen extension I designed and have subsequently built. More importantly though, a garden large enough to accommodate an actual greenhouse was a non-negotiable prerequisite for moving - it had to be one big enough for the plants that I wanted to grow, but also big enough to accommodate me.
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