Flâneur Gardening

My husband wrote last night that he was considering tearing down the covered terrace.

At present it is perhaps the most dominant feature of the house as it faces the largest part of the lawn. If we remove it, the house will regain more of its original look; cleaner, but also potentially more boring.

I’m torn in two over this. On one hand I know that the present covering is a poor construction, partly because it adds stress to the house itself and partly because at least one of the posts is subsiding. Also, of course, the shallow incline of the roof caused it to sag by nearly an inch during the heavy snow last winter, expressing both just how shallow the incline is, how poor the construction is and how much additional stress it transfers to the house itself during heavy snow.

On the other hand I love having the covered terrace where the temperature in the late summer evenings is almost 5 degrees Celsius higher than outside and no dew falls.

As it is, though, the current covering will need to be pulled down eventually, if not next year then in 5 years max. So would I want it rebuilt? Perhaps, perhaps not. However, if my husband wants to take it down early, I’ll gladly go along with it and embrace the opportunities it gives.

The covered terrace is facing North-West, so during summer it has a beautiful evening light. If torn down, we’d certainly want to create an open terrace there, but we would be freed from the restraints of the present layout. In my head a new terrace would be smaller, but surrounded by wide borders of – fragrant? – flowers.

The sitting room – with the dining recess – overlooks the present terrace, so clearly a new terrace layout would need to be partly designed to look good through the windows. I could imagine borders with loads of white flowers that would be visible, even after dusk when you’ve retired inside.

It excites me to imagine what we could do if we replace the covered terrace. I love the way it creates a blank canvas for us to create a space that is entirely ours. And I love the way that by removing something so important to the look of the house and replacing it with something of our own invention, we’d be putting our own indelible stamp on the house.

I can imagine raised beds at either end of the new terrace, painted the same colour as the house to create a sense of unity, and a wide border between the terrace and the lawn. Perhaps we could retain the clematises around the present terrace by adding narrow tepees for them to ramble through?

For now this is all just fantasy, but we will spend the winter looking into our options and possible plans for this VERY important part of the garden. There’s definitely potential for an amazing new garden space, even if it would mean that the garden would have another year of looking all rough and newly-hewn…