A garden bench is never really unoccupied. Even if gardeners never actually sit down, their benches are filled with the alluring vision of themselves relaxing, instead of weeding and deadheading.
If there were only enough time, they could sit down and meditate on their labors. Raising that possibility is reason enough to have a bench in every garden, even if what generally gets parked on it are tools and baskets, instead of people.
A garden bench, whether it is made of wood, metal, stone or plastic, promises more than a garden chair; company is what it offers, even if the companion is also imaginary.
A bench set at the end of the garden takes the viewer across space to a distant self, contemplative or gregarious as the mood strikes. Garden paintings (and engravings of famous European landscape gardens like Stowe in England or Mereville in France, widely circulated in the 18th century) use this bench trick, too, always showing a place to sit, but no sitter. The message is, You the viewer are welcome here; this is yours to contemplate and enjoy.
Imagined respite, imagined companionship, imagined contemplation. So what is real about a garden bench? These leggy creatures provide substantial design assistance, especially in controlling movement and space. They organize views: where a bench appears, there is always something to look at — maybe not always a whopping panorama; perhaps just a view down a path, or a wonderful planting.
Spacewise, there is a sort of chicken and egg situation with benches: which comes first, the space that cries out for a bench or the bench that demands a setting?
“A bench — garden furniture of any kind, really — holds memories of better days, of the seasons when the weather was warm and the air was sweet,” said Judith Milne, of James & Judith Milne, a Manhattan dealer in garden furniture and ornament. “When you look out the window in winter, when the flowers are gone, the form and ornamentation of whatever garden seating is out there become the flowers of the garden. So if you go for a year-round bench, make sure what you choose is not only weatherproof but can stand on its own as an object, that it’s not just a place to sit.”
Not all garden benches stand on four feet; the classical post and lintel bench, made of two stone slabs topped by a third slab, does not. Nor does the rare rocker bench, like the two- or three-seater painted a mild cobalt blue that the Milnes hoped to sell at the Antique Garden Furniture Show and Sale, an annual spring event at the New York Botanical Garden.
“It dates to about 1900, and sat on the porch of a couple in Macomb, Ill., who were both ministers,” Judith Milne said. “It was probably made right there in the Midwest.”
One can imagine the reverend couple leaning their heads against the 48-inch-tall slatted back at the end of a long pastoral day, rocking in unison and gazing peacefully out into their garden. Such a fine old piece is best sheltered on a porch, or even used indoors, but a terrace with some weather protection would do.
For stability, dry feet and ease of mowing, most garden benches that are placed away from the house are better off if they are set on a level platform, like a pad of gravel or brick or some flagstones sunk unobtrusively in the lawn.
Does a garden bench have to be comfortable to sit on? Barbara Israel, of Barbara Israel Garden Antiques in New York City and Katonah, N.Y., maintains not. “I sincerely don’t think it does have to be especially comfortable,” she said. “What a garden bench offers is the idea of comfort, a kind of mental padding.”
She said that unless a bench is a part of a group of furniture intended for drinks or dining, it is usually a temporary resting spot. “No one sits there for very long,” she said.
More important, she cautioned, a bench should complement the style of the house. “There are few benches that suit every garden,” she said. “A late Victorian bench by Peter Timmes, for instance — very high Renaissance revival, birthday-cake cast iron beyond belief — it just demands to be tucked into some very self-conscious arbor.”
At the New York Botanical Garden show, she displayed several comfortable 19th-century cast-iron garden seats designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a Prussian architect, set designer and landscape painter, who died in 1841. “Protomodernist” is how Israel characterizes the furniture he designed for Potsdam Park in 1835. His sleek Biedermeieresque designs were put in general production in Prussia and made for decades in foundries not only there but also in Britain, France and America.
The phrase “antique garden furniture” is nearly an oxymoron when the subject turns to American wooden furniture. What benches do survive are Windsor in style: light and portable enough to be moved easily and stored indoors. But in the 1980s John Danzer, a perspicacious Manhattan garden furniture designer, heard about what turned out to be the oldest known piece of garden furniture in America, a high-style Chinese Chippendale number made of yellow pine that dates to the 1760s.
Known as the Almodington bench after the Maryland Eastern Shore plantation where it sat for more than a century, it had, by the time Danzer saw it, traveled a few miles to the porch of another old plantation house. Purchased and restored with gifts from Danzer and an anonymous client, the original was donated to the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, N.C. Danzer kept the reproduction rights for his Manhattan company, Munder Skiles, which sells the bench.
Painted its original white, or done up in midnight green as Danzer first saw it, this lovely garden dinosaur — 8 feet long, 45 inches high and with a “shutter back” of four louvered panels — has a graphic intensity that zings up any garden, large or small. It is available in teak ($4,500) or mahogany ($3,600), “but I’d love to make it in recycled plastic, which is a material that’s coming of age,” he said.
