Small Patios [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONA garden patio invites you to leave the house and live outdoors. Add a chair and a place to put up your feet, and you can read the headlines of the morning newspaper in the fresh air while you also read the clouds and the prospect of warmth or rain. Later in the day, you might bring refireshments outside for friends, and all stay to watch the moon rise through the garden trees.The desire to live outdoors grows as our homes and cities become crowded and work takes place more and more indoors. But the desire is fickle. We leave the comfort of the house only perhaps if we see sunlight playing over the seat of an outdoor chair and a trumpet vine's flowers blowing soft and rosy pink in the air. A patio needs a special quality. To set our feet in motion, it must be convivial like an indoor room and yet also be open to the flowers, trees, and sky. Then we are drawn irresistibly by the adventure of finding a sheltered place in the wild, a tug so strong that it's probably written in our bones.In visiting gardens for this book, I saw a kaleidoscope of beautiful outdoor living spaces. Some patios offered an exhilarating view, others an intimate refuge in the heart of a city. Some were true extensions of the indoor living room, the flooring continued straight over the threshold into the garden and out toward the trees, the furniture as elegant and comfortable as indoors. In other gardens, tiny patiosno more than stopping placeshad been created to catch a pleasant view over a fence or to take advantage of a sheltered spot out of the wind.A large outdoor patio close to the house is a luxury, like a large living room and dining room indoors. With such a patio, you can hold birthday parties outdoors and invite lots of neighbors to drop by for an afternoon in the sun. More essential than this kind of patio, however, are the small resting places you might distribute through the garden, hideaways from which to admire