Basic things for creating canopy in the garden

Liquidambar four-poster

I think you may have heard or read me bang on about my love of canopy, and I can trace this back to my parents’ four poster bed, which my mother had upholstered in the eighties with a bright green sunburst and rosy chintz curtains with tiebacks and raspberry pink piping and frills coming out of the piping. I think perhaps the pink piping with the frills were the best bit of this set-up for me, and I have extremely vivid memories of closing the curtains and lying in this bed. The only thing better than this particular bed for me was a CHILD SIZED four poster that I was allowed to sleep in during a magical holiday with cousins in Scotland. This cousin also taught me to drive and told me that I’d have more control over the car if I accelerated around corners. Yes, I love her too. And also yes, to have my own four poster bed, the perfect size for me was, as far as I was concerned, the epitome of wish-fulfilment.

The reasons? Not as much about being a princess as you might think (although there was a fair dollop of that for sure)…no, it was more about being enclosed in ones own little private place within ones room. I suppose this is why all children like to make camps; there must be an element of being drawn to the safety of a small, cave-like space where we feel enclosed.

Wisteria scrambling, and enclosing

And that’s what it is for me; I want to feel embraced in my living space, and that includes the garden. This equates to being cuddled in winter and protected (and specifically shaded) in summer. I only really understood this properly after I sat and wrote down how I wanted the garden to feel, rather than focusing on how I wanted it to look. Instead of obsessing about which flowers I wanted to grow, I isolated this idea of protection and used that as my inspiration, and immediately, this idea of canopy became central to all of it.

This yearning was then re-ignited when I went to Chelsea in the early 2000s (I think…?) and saw a garden with a four poster bed made of trees and moss, like the one from Max’s room in Where The Wild Things Are, which again was the literal embodiment of what I was always wanting in an outdoor space. Having asked my gardening friends I can now confirm that this was the 2007 CAF Giving Garden by Tiggy Salt. I cannot find a single photo of it online (or in my camera) which is deeply upsetting but I see from the very bad photo on the web that the posts of the bed were made up of what look like liquidambar, (or acer?)

Liquidambar and wisteria canopy (and mower bucket which I ought, perhaps to have moved before I took this photo) oh, and boy too.

As always, slow to put things in motion, it was quite a number of years until I made my own version of this four-poster in my garden today, with four L-shaped metal beams on one side, and four umbrella-pruned liquidambar trees on the other. The idea is that the wisteria will soon meet the liquidambar, and the canopy will be complete, after which I presume I’ll be battling with it annually to maintain a balance between light and shade.

This is everything I want to feel. Everything.

Here are some ways to get instant canopy, in the absence of a tree!

Like a four poster bed, but one you can dismantle and put away in the winter - aren’t they divine? Link here.

This company makes really good, sturdy and beautiful iron garden furniture on commission but they have a small collection of ‘off the peg’ products like these arches. Obviously, metal arches are widely available but buying cheap ones is one of the worst false economy things you can possibly do to yourself because they warp and break, just as the climber you have lovingly nursed to fruition is reaching its full potential (believe me, I have done this more than once). So you need something like this, or a local blacksmith to make you a support that will last, and then set it into the ground using concrete, no less. It’s a faff, but there’s honestly no easier, cheaper way.

Parasols are the easiest instant canopy solution. This one looks very good and I really like the base. One or three of these can give you a very satisfactory summer in the absence of any dappled shade, and the time to plan ahead for getting some kind of structure up and something growing on it for next year (which will appear in a flash, SWEAR).

Enough! I think more hot weather is on the way, and do check out my June Live with Ann-Marie, which is all about what we’re NOT doing this month in our gardens.

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x Laetitia