May is the time to turn your home life inside out for warm-weather living. Spend a weekend perking up your deck or patio for the months ahead. Here are easy, inspiring ideas.
Frame your outdoor dining table with potted trees, suggests Michael E. Spitzer of Landgarden Architects in New York City. Put one at each corner of the "room" to create a shady canopy of leaves. His favorites include hardy crab apples, honey locusts, and evergreens, such as spruce and juniper. For a nice nighttime touch, string white minilights up the trunks and into the branches. (Caution: "Watch the weight load," Spitzer says. An 8- to 10-foot tree in a 3 x 3 x 3–foot pot can exert up to 60 pounds of pressure per square foot. Apartment or condo dwellers should consult building management about load limits on balconies and decks.)
Use paint to perk up lackluster garden furniture. Annie Sloan, author of Annie Sloan's Painted Garden, paints a rainbow of ice-cream pastels on the wooden backs and seat slats of simple metal-frame garden chairs. Each slat gets a different color—mint green next to lemon yellow, sky blue, pink, and violet. Or paint a wooden bench bright red to contrast with greenery. A blue garden wall provides a soothing backdrop for foliage.
Add the soothing sound of water with a fish tank pump and an old-fashioned galvanized washtub. Seal the tub's inside seams with silicone caulking. Then turn the submersible pump on its side in the bottom of the tub to create a gentle gurgle of water on the surface; weigh it down with a rock. Add pots of water plants, such as water lilies. Let the "pond" settle for about a week, then add a few goldfish to control mosquitoes.
Plant an herb garden. With the right container, you can grow a bumper crop of herbs in a few feet of deck space. Pamela Crawford, author of Container Gardens for Florida, gives a green thumbs-up to the three-tiered, three-foot-tall iron planter ($120) from Kinsman Company. Line the planter's baskets with coco fiber to hold a generous layer of potting soil, then set in a variety of herbs. "Plant with an eye to different colors and textures—rosemary next to parsley next to sage—so your herb garden is as decorative as it is delicious," Crawford says.(Click here for our guide to herb gardening.)
