Garden furniture. (Design Notes).(Henry Hall Designs)

Carrying seating furniture outside in order to enjoy temperate weather and garden vistas in comfort was a common practice in earlier times, and we know that wicker furniture, being light and portable, served this purpose in ancient Egypt. Permanent garden seats were made of stone and other durable materials and are still popular today The eminently portable windsor chair is depicted in a wide array of English portraits painted outdoors in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in an article in this magazine published in February 1979, Simon Jervis, a British furniture historian, noted that the windsor chair had evolved from chairs on wheels used to propel monarchs and the nobility through the garden. He proposed that the popularity of the nonwheeled windsor might in large part be due to the simultaneous movement to expand the scale of English gardens using the skills of professional landscape architects. One of the most important of those was Hurnphry Repton, who not only included a windsor chair in an aquatint view of the garden behind his own cottage in Essex, but also in the gardens and parks of grand country estates that he captured in the beautifully colored renderings that comprise his Red Books. Windsor style benches were also quite commonly used in gardens until they gave way to more elaborate and sturdy garden benches after designs published by leading cabinetmakers and architects.

At the end of the nineteenth century landscape architects were voicing strong opinions about what might be suitable for a garden seat. William Robinson wrote: "It is rare to see a garden seat that is not an eyesore." And by 1918 Gertrude Jekyll offered her opinion in her book Garden Ornament that "for Gardens of lesser ...