Garden room

In gardening, a garden room is a secluded and partly enclosed space within a garden that creates a room-like effect. Such spaces have been part of garden design for centuries. Generally they are regarded as different from terraces and patios just outside a building, although in practice these are often the parts of a garden that are most used as a room, with tables and chairs. Walls and hedges may form part of the boundaries of a garden room, but plants, usually at least a few feet tall, will do as well. Apart from the entrances to the room, these should normally enclose the space. There may be furniture, especially for sitting down, but this is not essential. In architecture, the term "garden room" may be used for a sunroom, conservatory, or any room with a good view of a garden, or even one decorated with a garden theme. A small single-roomed building for leisure in a garden is usually called a summer house, gazebo, or garden house. Below a certain size a very small garden can hardly help being room-like, and the term is mostly used for larger gardens, where distinct areas are possible. Garden rooms can introduce variety and structure to a garden, and be suitable spaces for displays that are especially seasonable. In cold or windy areas, the garden room may offer necessary shelter to the plants inside, a factor in their use at Hidcote Manor Garden. The term is not liked by some gardeners, and others consider it to be "overused". Jenny Uglow talks of the "garden rooms" described by Pliny the Younger in his letters giving long, but difficult to interpret, accounts of his two very large country villa gardens. These were by the sea and in the Tuscan hills, the latter with many terraces, and Pliny stresses the views to outside the garden. Enclosure was "the prime characteristic of all medieval gardens and parks" according to John Dixon Hunt, and contemporary illustrations and literary accounts of gardens place great emphasis on the controlled entries to what were very often walled gardens, with further sub-divisions within.