Outer Space
The Proverbs advise us to “Prepare your outside work, make it fit for yourself in the field; and afterward build your house.” It is sound advice: establish yourself a source of income before investing money in your home. But man has added a fourth stanza after the building of one’s home: ‘prepare yourself gardens.’ It is an interesting characteristic of human nature that, after we have established our income – our ‘outside work’ – and built our habitation, we return to the ‘outside’ and prepare gardens. It is a consistent feature of archaeological discoveries that when a society becomes prosperous (sort of a prerequisite to even having something for archaeologists to discover), it goes back outside and builds elaborate gardens.
One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘Hanging Gardens’ of Babylon. Gardening is both a timeless and international pastime, with famous examples stretching from Tivoli, Italy to Kyoto, Japan and back to Versailles, France. But for most of human history, pleasure gardens were for the rich; commonfolk were too busy tending their own vegetable patch for survival to give thought (or money) to something built entirely for aesthetic enjoyment.
Modern Western civilization has seen prosperity spread much wider than anyone dreamed possible even a hundred or so years ago. Men and women still follow the same basic, proverbial path of ‘preparing their work outside’ – afterward finding their ‘forever home’ – and finally going back outside to prepare that envelope of enjoyment we called ‘gardens.’ The transition begins at the porch or patio and moves to the outdoor kitchen or cabana, with appropriate shade trees and seasonal flower beds.
All of this requires forethought and design, and that is why the AJH family of design/build companies – AJH Renovations, LLC; Designed for Downtown, LLC; and AJH Custom Homes, LLC – added landscape design to our portfolio of services. Personalizing one’s own garden space can be the work of a lifetime, but our design studio can definitely get you started with a master plan. Give us a call today to start the conversation.