Greenhouse Ideas and Principles

Frost greenhouses are classically elegant, functional buildings. Manufactured by our craftsmen from the finest materials, they are designed to take pride of place as the beautiful centrepiece of your productive garden.

The greenhouse is the hub around which your garden world revolves. It is where your seedlings germinate and flourish in the warmth and protection of the greenhouse until the winter melts into spring and the seedlings become healthy young plants ready for their garden world outside. They make way for cropping plants. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons, aubergines and all manner of healthy and tasty fruits of the vegetable world.

Your greenhouse is also a wonderful place to be. Full of daylight, protected by the elements come wind, rain or shine it is full of the smell of plant life, moist compost and light. Make a space in it for yourself where you can sit and plan or daydream. Install a kettle and a radio and lose yourself for hours tending to your plants or lose yourself in blissful silence and peace.

The Frost Garden Glasshouse is not made of metal nor hateful plastic! It is timber, good wood which can take a nail and a bump from a passing wheelbarrow without being disfigured for life. In fact given time and the rigours of life I believe that a well used timber structure if looked after will look better and better as time passes.

I have been making conservatories and orangeries and all sorts of in-between structures for some time. What has interested me is not the architecture, important though that undoubtedly is. No, what has driven me on is the lifestyle which is imposed on us by the homes that we live in. What has inspired me about greenhouses after so much time spent on arguably ‘higher’ structures is that life is simple. Simple pleasures and simple truths are the strongest and most lasting. The most basic pleasures are about the surroundings we live in and the food that we live upon. The home is about much more than the house. The soul is the community and the shared experiences of the family. In the garden the greenhouse is the centre of production. What the greenhouse brings to the home is a self-sufficient core, a well of renewal, season after season, a hobby, a skill, a humbling lesson in how much we don’t know……!

The house merely enables a home to exist. It is the life within the home that defines family, comfort and support. Let’s create the best home which can be accommodated within the cartilage of the property. Let the rooms whose function is introverted be introverted. Let the rooms of rest be restful, let the purposeful rooms be purposeful. After all, a good workshop cannot have the same characteristics as a good snug!

The purpose, the function of a room should be defined and reflected in its characteristics. Sitting rooms are almost invariably introverted, facing inwards, facing the fire and nowadays the television which are the objects of interest together with the occupants of the armchairs and sofas which are invariably making the best circle available encompassing those central objects of intent.

The greenhouse as i can see it is the fountain of garden fecundity. Combined with a good set of composting bays converting waste vegetation into good fertiliser, it is a metaphor for renewable life. A healthy and natural cycle to life within harmony.

So what makes a good home, a good garden, a good greenhouse?

The Home. Enables its occupants to develop and express themselves in rooms. Whose characteristics suit their requirements, whose nature enhances their function.

The Garden. All the historic traditions of gardens reflect the time that they were created in. Where are they today? I would say in an age where we expect so much from everything. The garden is therefore ‘scenic’, providing a great view, easy on maintenance, (effort is at a premium) productive, (cost effectiveness in all) and green.