On a practical level it’s about conceiving and executing in a user profile led way. I’m only in my early forties and when I am out in the garden I continually find myself looking for any sort of an available makeshift bench or platform on which to put close quarters work rather than attempt to attend to it on the ground. I’m talking about the small jobs; unravelling a ball of string, sorting out hose connections, hand sawing a few stakes. I do it, so why wouldn’t someone in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties want to do it? Henceforth I want to be doing all my gardening at hip height or above, and I know you do too.
The raised bed, now there’s an oxymoron. Your experience of the”raised” bed in all probability consists of four mismatching lengths of 10 x 2 nailed together into a quadrilateral, dropped onto invariably unlevel ground and filled with compost. Voila. Easier to weed, easier to tend to I hear the “raised” bed apologists cry. Maybe, but only marginally so. Let’s get it up, let’s make it deeper to accommodate any veg and get it up on legs to just below hip height; the sweet spot where everything is possible. Possible in a pain free way.
Why can’t we design for pots? Oh how we love our last minute panic pot peppering; stick one here, stick one there just before the barbie guests arrive. “Senetti, they’re Senetti”.If you were in your seventies would you prefer a swathe of ground level planting beds to have to tend to or some form of movable display frame tailored to suit your plant and pot sizes; easily tended, moved, fertilised, wed?
Take the living wall a logical step further. Imagine the plant equivalent of a floor to ceiling bookcase against one wall of, say, a courtyard or a patio. Filled with plants and simple to look after.
Unless you’re the type that has framed Monty Don posters on the sitting room wall you probably find gardening a bit too much like hard work. Making things easier brings everyone that little bit closer to the net. Nobility in suffering is so twentieth century.
There can be something for everyone in one fell swoop; the kids, the golden oldies, the sceptics. All it needs is some thought.
The raised bed, now there’s an oxymoron. Your experience of the”raised” bed in all probability consists of four mismatching lengths of 10 x 2 nailed together into a quadrilateral, dropped onto invariably unlevel ground and filled with compost. Voila. Easier to weed, easier to tend to I hear the “raised” bed apologists cry. Maybe, but only marginally so. Let’s get it up, let’s make it deeper to accommodate any veg and get it up on legs to just below hip height; the sweet spot where everything is possible. Possible in a pain free way.
Why can’t we design for pots? Oh how we love our last minute panic pot peppering; stick one here, stick one there just before the barbie guests arrive. “Senetti, they’re Senetti”.If you were in your seventies would you prefer a swathe of ground level planting beds to have to tend to or some form of movable display frame tailored to suit your plant and pot sizes; easily tended, moved, fertilised, wed?
Take the living wall a logical step further. Imagine the plant equivalent of a floor to ceiling bookcase against one wall of, say, a courtyard or a patio. Filled with plants and simple to look after.
Unless you’re the type that has framed Monty Don posters on the sitting room wall you probably find gardening a bit too much like hard work. Making things easier brings everyone that little bit closer to the net. Nobility in suffering is so twentieth century.
There can be something for everyone in one fell swoop; the kids, the golden oldies, the sceptics. All it needs is some thought.
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