Gardener’s Retreat Interest Grows In The Utility And Mystique Of Potting Sheds

It is a place of new beginnings and renewal, of mystery and imagination, of vision and hard work, and of escape and contemplation.

In the winter it mostly slumbers, but come early spring, the gardener, the bulbs, the seedlings and the soil awaken, and the place becomes a hive of garden activity.

It is the potting shed, that humble structure that holds the gardener’s tools, pots, bulbs, dreams and secrets. Long a tradition in the British Isles, potting sheds are popping up in the United States as gardeners grow in numbers and seriousness.

“In the last five years, there’s been a real resurgence” of interest in all aspects of gardening, said Linda Joan Smith, author of “The Potting Shed” (Workman, $18.95), the first in a series of gardening books sponsored by Smith & Hawken. “Now people are becoming gardening connoisseurs.”

Gardening is the most popular leisure activity in America, according to U.S. News & World Report, with 37 percent of households taking some part in working the soil.

Smith said that while the tradition of garden beds has run unbroken in Britain, in the United States, “We lost it in the ‘20s and became much more enamored of lawns and lawn mowers.”

But garden beds require different kinds of tools, and flowers especially need an array of containers and other equipment to keep them going.

“As people get more and more into gardening, they realize they need a support system,” Smith said.

Enter the potting shed - as gardeners do for a bit of warmth in March and April, for a place to store mulch and potting soil and pots, for a place to start seeds, for a place to hang up tools.

All sorts of structures can shelter a potting bench. Sidney Silber, who has been gardening with his wife, Jean, for more than three decades, uses the back of an old wagon for his pots and tools. The wagon is outside an old barn.

One day recently Silber was potting some bare-root osmunda ferns, and moving some small trees to larger pots.

“The barn is where I keep all the tools, shovels, axes, carts, bales of peat moss and cow manure,” he said. But the wagon “is the focal point for the garden, the working part of it.”

Smith, who gardens in California, says outdoor potting areas are common there. She uses an old garage as her potting shed.

Although the romance is appealing, a lovely stone structure with a fireplace and Gothic woodwork isn’t essential, she said.

“It can be anywhere - a laundry room, a corner of the kitchen, a space in the garage,” she said. “The primary requirement is a nice big work surface and some place where it’s OK to get dirty.

“The second most important thing is to have a warm place.” Warmth is essential if you’re trying to get seeds to germinate.

And you need a place to store things.

“I use those big plastic containers with lids” for such things as soil and fertilizer, she said, “and I have lots of containers and holders.”

Her garage is convenient because it has exposed rafters and studs. There’s plenty of space to hang things up or store them overhead. But her ideal garden shed would have a sink with running water and “a small greenhouse attached.”

But what all potting sheds and benches have in common, Smith said, is a touch of history.

“One of the things I like about working in the potting shed is the continuity to the past,” she said. “You’re doing something that people have done for centuries.”

When she was researching “The Potting Shed,” she said, she really enjoyed “talking to gardeners who had grown up with potting sheds. People who grew up around them had such vivid memories. For kids it was kind of a mysterious place.”

One man told her that the predominant characteristic of the potting shed “is not what they look like; it’s what they smell like” - that mixture of soil and fertilizer “and maybe a dead mouse that’s under a stack of boards.”

As they personalize their gardens, gardeners also put their particular stamp on their work spaces, Smith said.

“Potting sheds really do become a kind of retreat for the gardener - a place to be by ourselves and focus on the joys of starting seeds,” she said. “It really becomes a personal place.”

How people use their potting sheds, of course, is also personal.

“For some, it’s a down-to-earth, hard-core place of work,” Smith said. “But I talked to one lady who said she uses it as a place to drink her coffee in the morning and read a newspaper.”