Garden rooms

People are having a gas in their greenhouses, conservatories, garden rooms and even crab shacks.

These are spaces devoted to plants and plant paraphernalia, and perfect for retreating. Some are attached to the house, some are freestanding and romantic as a cabin in the woods, they are elaborate or slapdash but all seem to be immensely enjoyed.

Garden rooms in all shapes and sizes and prices are helping cold climate gardeners extend the growing season and enjoy the pleasure of being surrounded by green.

In my neighborhood I often walk by a place called the "Crabana". It's a side porch now covered in with plexiglass and home to real plants and fake plants, fish and fountains. It's campy in a Jimmy Buffet way and there's always a drink or coffee being poured and neighbors popping in for a visit.

A few blocks away there is a friendly looking shingled house and a garden always busy with construction and improvements. In the midst of the intense activity is a completely charming garden room. It looks like a combination studio/doll house/potting shed. There is a comfy couch, a lamp glowing at night, tools, pots, potting soil and seed packets. It's parked on the edge of a hill overlooking Hamilton harbour and the city skyline. It would be the perfect place to escape just about anything.

Escape is a strong part of the allure of these garden rooms. One of the gardens we shot for Gardener's Journal a few years ago was at a big beautiful house, with a generous sized swimming pool, and at least an acre of gardens. But the favorite spot of the owner was a smallish gazebo tucked at the back of the property, she used it as a place to study and write. It was built by Limestone Trail (www.limestonetrail.com). Their Victorian style gazebos kits range in price from five thousand dollars, to $12,480. They also have stylish cabanas and cabins that look homey enough to live in.

Testimonials on the Limestone Trail website, confirmed my suspicion that people view these scaled down spaces as retreats, places of tranquility and evocative of childhood playhouses.

At a cottage called "The Barking Squirrels" photographer Cees Van Gemerden has a rustic garden room with a woodstove, grapevine overhead, art on the walls, and a place for his bike. It's a cool transition zone between the house and the sunny backyard. It is the epitome of frugal and efficient construction.

In contrast, the greenhouse of Albert Alexanian on the edge of Hamilton Ontario's mountain brow, is lush and luxurious. Plants have grown lustily there for forty years, some collected as tiny cuttings when Alexanian toured Europe on summer music tours.

There are lemon and limes, bougainvillea, cactus, palms, ficus and oleanders.

He does all the plant tending himself. "I do a big chop in November, it takes me two days to prune and cut back. The plants grow so fast it has to be done," Alexanian says.

The concept of a garden room for the Canadian climate is explained beautifully in a book by a former Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario. In Designing a Garden Allen Paterson described his garden room with its gravel and brick floor for draining away water, double-glazed windows for collecting winter sun and cool temperatures which benefited a wide variety of plants. At night the room could dip as low as 2C and reach 18C on a sunny day. In these conditions Mediterranean plants flourished. He was surrounded by rosemary, jasmine, camellia, freesias, clivia and oleander. Imagine the flowers and fragrance. The cool room was the perfect link between house and garden, and meant that horticultural pursuits could be carried on all year.

There's a lot of talk these days about a sense of enclosure in the garden, and that's what garden rooms are all about. I love the description by the late Landscape Architect James Rose from 1958 on the essence of a garden, "I think it would be the sense of being within something while still being out of doors."

It's worth looking at the website devoted to James Rose (www.jamesrosecenter.org) to see how fresh and provocative his ideas about garden design remain today.