Garden Seat

This is a summary of the 176^th pattern from the “A Patter Language” book by Christopher Alexander and his team.

Somewhere in every garden, there must be at least one spot, a quiet garden seat, in which a person—or two people—can reach into themselves and be in touch with nothing else but nature.

Wordsworth built his entire politics, as a poet, around the fact that tranquility in nature was a basic right to which every-one was entitled. He wanted to integrate the need for solitude-in-nature with city living. He imagined people literally stepping off busy streets and renewing themselves in private gardens—every day. And now many of us have come to learn that without such a place life in a city is impossible. There is so much activity, days are so easily filled with jobs, family, friends, things to do—that time alone is rare. And the more we live without the habit of stillness, the more we tie ourselves to this active life, the stranger and more disquieting the experience of stillness and solitude becomes: city people are notoriously busy-busy, and cannot be alone, without “input,” for a moment.

It is in this context that we propose the isolated garden seat: a place hidden in the garden where one or two people can sit alone, undisturbed, near growing things. It may be on a roof top, on the ground, perhaps even half-sunken in an embankment.

Perhaps, of all the various forms of gossip overheard by the garden, the loveliest is that between a young and an old person who are friends. Real friendship between the generations is rare, but when it exists it is of the finest. That youth is fortunate who can pour his perplexities into the ear of an older man or woman, and who knows a comradeship and an understanding exceeding in beauty the facile friendships created by like interests and common pursuits; and fortunate too the girl who is able to impart the emotions and ideas aroused in her by her early meetings with the world and life to some one old in experience but comprehendingly young in heart. Both of them will remember those hours long after the garden gate has closed behind their friend forever; as long, indeed, as they remember anything that went to the making of the best in them.

Make a quiet place in the garden—a private enclosure with a comfortable seat, thick planting, sun. Pick the place for the seat carefully; pick the place that will give you the most intense kind of solitude.