It is slightly difficult to write a column about garden furniture when you have never actually owned any. The table and chairs we used till last January were acquired when I married Bryan 33 years ago. He'd already had them for a decade or two. A quite small wombat attack finally recently demolished them.
That was in the early days of COVID-19. Aha, I thought, we will buy new garden chairs and a table and have socially distant delicious lunches in the sunlight and fresh air. This plan was demolished by the lockdown rules long before the furniture I'd ordered online arrived.
Well, not quite the furniture I had ordered. The advisement said ''just unfold, ready to use''. Which was true, but omitted to say that every spoke in each chair needed to be fitted to at least one other piece, and sometimes two, and every slat in the table had to be fitted, too. It took Bryan a fortnight to assemble it. It was only then that I pointed out the 2.5-meter-long table I had ordered was about 1.5 metres, and there are five and 4.98 chairs instead of six. When lockdown is finally over Bryan may be able to buy the pieces to complete chair number six. The whole assembly is also considerably spindlier than the photo on the box.
I could send them back. But how? Spend two weeks disassembling them, six hours on the phone and two days on email on the chance I will get a refund? Besides they are ... okay.
We actually only use garden furniture when someone does a photo shoot of a garden writer and assumes she sits on chairs in the garden. I prefer to sit on a rock by the creek, or in the creek, or on the grass. Those garden lunches are never likely to eventuate, as it's a hassle to carry lunch outside when we can just open the windows and outside is 30cm from the dining table with no chance the wombats will chew a visitors' shoes. (Wombats can be fascinated with shoes, especially their laces. The shoelace scents are gloriously exotic to a wombat.)
What are the rules of good garden furniture?
1. It must be solid. Two-year-olds may climb on it. Friends celebrating their birthday may decide to dance on it. Wombats may try to jump up on it in case carrots are beings served, or even better, parsnips. You don't want a table that will wobble in the breeze. You should be able to sit on the edge of a good table without worrying that you and it may collapse.
2. It should be made of wood. This, however, may be personal preference. I love wood. I could pretend I love wooden furniture because it locks up carbon dioxide for as long as it is used, but basically, I just love wood. Our old wooden chairs just grew a fine batch of ornamental lichen and needed no care at all for almost half a century. The ''metal'' these days is also likely to be aluminum, which doesn't rust, but may roll through your French windows in a gale or be tipped over far too easily.
3. Wooden garden furniture should not be pillaged from a tropical rainforest timber; not pine, because it won't last for 50 years of rain and sun, and why buy furniture that won't last 50 years? You need to know the provenance of recycled wood i.e. was it once the floorboards in an arsenic factory? In fact, you need to know where any wood came from. My favorite woods are red ironbark - almost impossible to find these days - and red gum, which is difficult but one does fall over the road now and then. The next time we have a suitable fallen tree I need to find local furniture maker ... assuming I want more garden furniture. I probably won't.
But that's because I already spend a far bit on my day in the garden, or mooching in the bush. If I'd been in an air-conditioned office for eight hours, I'd want to eat dinner outdoors as often as the weather would permit. Add a shade sail, pergola, small courtyard walls to stop the wind and capture winter sunlight, an outdoor pizza or bread oven, and the furniture would see even more use. Garden furniture will also be useful when the grandkids are old enough for us to want to say ''why don't you and your friends do that outside'' - on the extremely sturdy garden chairs and table.
Which brings me to the most important rule of garden furniture. It must be intrinsically beautiful enough not to have to look immaculate. Spills of beetroot, red wine, salad dressing, experiments with adding yeast to see if you can blow up a tomato in midsummer (you didn't read that suggestion, kids) - all these should be able to add to the history of a table, without racing to get bleach/paint to clean a garden table because I have never really tried.
I have a feeling our new set of not- what-I-ordered won't quite measure up. But it will do.
This week I am:
- Planting more winter lettuces, because even in our cold winters they actually do grow in winter
- Giving away rhubarb. It has been an appalling harvest of just about everything but for some reason the rhubarb has thrived.
- Picking natal plums. These are a South African fruit that loves droughts - yellow, plum-like but with more seed and tougher skin. Our tree last heavy crop was about 2003. When the apples fail, the natal plums become prolific.
- Admiring the proteas a kind neighbor left in our letter box. (Our protea died in early January in the worst of the bushfire winds)
- Also planting bok choi, as they grow quickly. I am not sure we will ever eat all the bok choi that decides to germinate, but hopefully someone will.
- Trying to work out why the low-growing pink salvia that did nothing for five years has suddenly grown metres wide after this year's drought, heat wave and flood that nearly killed it. Possibly it just needed terrifying: grow now, or you may ever get another chance.
