Garden Shed

The garden shed is a place to be private, keep our most special tools and store our seeds. Many garden sheds have been transformed into mini-workshops for wood or metalwork; A friend is remodelling his shed as a place to write a novel; an old aunt has just built one as a place to go and contemplate the garden. She calls it her ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin’.

The garden shed is a metaphor for a place we can call our own. It may only be the corner of another room where we can sit at a desk or table and juggle quietly with ideas for our latest project. If we are lucky, it might be a whole room that is exclusively ours, where we can shut the door and for a brief time disengage ourselves completely from the world.

Sometimes the garden shed is just a mental space created by donning a pair of headphones and closing our eyes or a journal where we record our thoughts. The most important thing about the garden shed is that it is ours and ours alone. No-one is allowed to enter it or intrude on it in any way. It is where we go to just be. It is where we go to imagine the kind of seeds we would like to plant. It is where we go to hone our skills, our bodies, our intellect.

As a child, I used to think our garden shed was a playhouse; as adults we need that kind of place too.