Choosing Outdoor Furniture



I grew up in an era when lawn furniture meant webbed aluminum lawn chairs and lounges or redwood-stained picnic table sets. We’ve come a long way baby. Today we can choose among an endless array of wood, wrought iron, and cast aluminum pieces, in a wide variety of styles.

Don’t just buy what’s on sale at the home store, but think about the style and colors that will tie your seating areas to the house. Our new Adirondack chairs, for example are paired with 30-year old end “tables” that are actually seats from a discarded picnic set. Once they were all painted the same color teal, they looked like they belonged together.

Color is the great unifier, regardless of the type of furniture. Paint or stain tables and chairs the same color as your shutters, or other trim, and see how they suddenly become visually attached to the house.

Most people like more than one style, but avoid mixing several unrelated outdoor furniture styles together, or it will look like the hodge-podge that it is. Formal houses, such as Colonial or Greek Revival need formal furniture, a la Monet or Luytens wood benches, or old-fashioned white wrought iron; while cottages and farmhouses look best with an informal treatment, such as Adirondack or rustic-looking logs. Sleek, minimalist furniture works best with a contemporary home, while pieces with ornate curlicues flatter a Victorian. Within these broad categories, today’s manufacturers offer many variations. You’re sure to find something you can love for many years to come.

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have
Keep reading