The last in a series on home comforts written for Radio National’s Blueprint for Living. This was first aired on the 9th November 2024. You can listen to the audio here.

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Although the veranda has long been a staple of Australian life, something happened to the Australian backyard over the past thirty years. It became an outdoor room, a paved space with furniture and rugs and sometimes even a fireplace. And it was about time. It was clear from the prevalent use of the word backyard that the outside space was viewed as just that – grassed, perhaps and with a tree or two and a rotary hoist but not much else. Certainly not a garden. A garden was viewed with some suspicion. To have a garden was to have airs, and no one in Australia liked a tall poppy, metaphorically or in reality. But as aspirations grew, along with global travel, those who weren’t already hooked by gardening began to see some value in it. For a nation with such abundant sunshine, it’s a surprise that Australia took so long to comprehend the value of a beautiful outside space. Although there’s actually a long history of ambivalence towards the outside.

It was only in the late Georgian period in Britain that the garden became something you might actually enjoy pottering in for the sheer pleasure of it. Even the loathsome Mr Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is admired for working in his own garden. And certainly, as towns and cities began to sprawl, the garden in the average home became a thing to be desired. The Victorians were fixated on the idea of fresh air and a garden was a breath of the countryside in the city. Which urban design movements capitalised on, like the Garden City movement of 1902 and even Le Corbusier’s radiant city ideas of the 1920s, with apartment blocks set in parkland. In the twentieth century the idea of an enjoyable outdoor space became entrenched. Today’s apartment buildings usually have balconies or share communal gardens, like the CapitaSpring building in Singapore, designed by BIG and Carlo Ratti, which gives over four of its fifty-one storeys to garden terraces for its occupants. Whether we have a tiny balcony or a large garden, it’s a vital connection to the landscape, including when it is used to shield what’s beyond. Even if it’s only a pot of geraniums on a balcony, the outdoor space can bring immense pleasure, providing a focus for dreams, just as Gaston Bachelard said we needed.

The comfort of the outdoor space is in personal expression. The ambiance can be tweaked to suit our style, using designs that have become classics of the garden. Like the Arts and crafts charm conjured by a Lutyens timber bench, its rolled arms and curvy Baroque back designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1902 for one of his architectural marvels, Little Thakeham. Or evoking a French park by using metal Senat chairs first produced in the 1920s for the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Or by being more playful, using banana sunloungers with colourful plastic straps that give a hint of mid-century Palm Springs. Or tropical, infusing a Balinese mood through teak daybeds and thatched pergolas.  Whatever the designs used, the outdoor space can nourish us. And certainly, as we become aware of our damaged environment, the comfort of having, for instance, a hive of tiny stingless bees or in picking flowers, vegetables or herbs we have grown ourselves bring benefits that far outweigh the effort that put them there. Even when we furnish our outdoor space in a way that mimics the interior of the home, this too brings comfort. The difference is that we’re outside, under the great dome of the sky, aware of different sounds, a change from the contained space indoors. The importance of the outdoor space, even when it’s only a window box, is that link to nature that each of us needs. And it completes a cycle, permitting us to bask in the comforts of home that we have already accomplished.