Extending inside décor to outside is newest trend
One of the reasons I always go to the Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle is to see what’s hot in gardening for the year. This year I also visited Portland’s Yard, Garden and Patio Show and at both shows, the strongest trend I saw was the idea that your outdoor spaces, whether it’s a patio or an acre, are really just extensions and re-creations of your indoor living spaces.
For Jamie Durie, that’s the way it should be. Durie is an internationally recognized landscape designer best known in his home country of Australia for creating the concept of the “outdoor room.” Americans know him as one of the hosts of the PBS series “Victory Garden.”
Durie said he feels that access to nature is an intrinsic part of our well-being. “You aren’t really going to connect people with nature unless you create a destination for them,” he said. “Destination design is really the future of gardening.”
In this concept, Durie believes that people should look at their favorite places and rooms inside the house and then try to recreate them outside in the garden. Even in our short season in the Inland Northwest.
Take the patio that was once dominated by cheap lawn chairs and tacky umbrellas. In their place are comfortable all-weather sofas and chairs shaded by an all-season cover. For cool nights, there are gas-fired heaters placed in coffee tables or on stands to warm the air. With a little planning, you could even have an outdoor bedroom with a solar shower.
If you have memories of campfires on the beach or in the mountains, with destination design you can re-create those memories around your own gas- or wood-fired fire pit. It could be a simple metal container or ring on the ground on up to full natural stone fireplaces.
Want to eat outdoors? I saw outdoor kitchen set-ups that ranged from the simple grill to a fully functional kitchen such that you wouldn’t have to set foot in the house if you didn’t want to. Even in our short summer season, that appealed to me. One garden even had a chicken coop that made getting fresh eggs for that breakfast omelet a snap.
Vegetables and fruit replaced the usual annuals and perennials in several gardens. The vegetable plants looked right at home, creating gardens with even more color than would have been provided by conventional plants. Fixing the salad or a fresh ear of corn was easy when everything was at hand.