The Potting Shed

Finding a house that excited envy among our friends proved satisfying in ways I blush to acknowledge, but in fact I fell in love with the derelict barnlet tucked into a pine grove on the east edge of the lot. With its story-book gambrel roof and little pair of genuine four-pane windows (no ersatz mullions there), it spoke directly to my gardening soul. "Potting shed," it murmured seductively. "Potting shed. Potting shed."

I burbled about practical considerations: tools in neat array; garden paraphernalia banished from the garage; a home-away-from-house for my growing collection of terra cotta pots and sundries. While I may strike a pragmatic pose from time to time, my better half has learned to recognize a dream in need's clothing. His smile conveyed a familiar signal: message received; supporting arguments dismissed. (And he knew, before I did, where the path to a potting shed would lead.) We bought the incidental house.

Our new neighbor, ever hopeful that tidiness would prevail next door, suggested a product to restore the barnlet's weathered exterior to mint condition. My husband thanked him politely, but, having heard the buzzing of a quaint bee in my bonnet, he declined a restorative sample.

With Year One dedicated to house additions and landscape subtractions (snow melt revealed a fence-to-fence poison ivy ground cover), I turned a blind eye to potting shed flaws and concentrated on laying claim to the exterior. My mother-in-law, a four-foot-eleven-inch gardening dynamo, had left us a fetching set of well-worn garden tools which I hung along the west side of the shed to inspire our landscaping efforts. I hung and propped my own essential equipment inside, but access to them depended on atmospheric conditions. Molded into treacherous hills and valleys, the floor was dank clay on good days; potter's slip on bad ones. I'd chart a course to the tool du jour and launch myself, whooping and slithering, in its direction, hoping that I'd arrive upright and on target.

Year Two brought dramatic change in the course of one week. With quaintness to spare outside, I opted for a functional finish inside: particle-board sheathing, a concrete floor, simple shelves, and bottom-of-the-line base cabinets with a plastic-laminate counter top. Knowing that the shelves would brim with terra cotta, I sought a complementary aqua interior paint for the walls, and bonded immediately to a hue called "Lady of the Lake." We installed electric lights, water (via garden hose to a laundry sink), and central air (a counter top fan). I found a mobile-unit potting bench and rigged it with on-site essentials: trowel, fork, and border spade, of course, along with a Dutch hook, old kitchen knife, scissors, string, and soil amendments. Freshly equipped, Rolling Thunder sat beside the door and completed the scene. Never again would the shed be so clean, so tidy, so artfully arrayed, so utterly resplendent. I backed away to survey the wonder we had wrought. Turning around to stride up the gentle ramp to my new domain, I could hear my mother's voice. "Well," she would have said, "lah-tee-dah!"

Stepping back outside, I heard a hoarse whisper. "Split-rail fence," the potting shed breathed. "Rambling roses, hollyhocks (pause, pant) lilacs!" I swooned onto the rustic bench a carpenter friend had fashioned for me with weathered boards from our old dock. The full-blown vision emerging from my fevered brow did not electrify my husband.(I think he'd seen a preview the year before.)

This spring a split-rail fence supports clematis and rambling roses. Lilies and hollyhocks on the east side of the shed will soften the neighbor's view of weathered wood. Scores of bulbs should bestir themselves any day now along the welcoming woodchip path that wends from our driveway through a little pine grove and past a goat cart to the potting shed. Heaven, as far as I'm concerned, needn't offer more than this. And the house came with it.

Copyright © 1999, Julie B. Scouten
Originally published in Northern Gardener Magazine, March 1999