In praise of screened porches
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The ideal garden hangout - a screened porch. — ntm1909/Creative Commons
Terraces are très chic and decks are ducky, but for real out-of-doors livability, you need a good old-fashioned screened porch.
I’m not sure why something so marvelous, so versatile, fell out of architectural favor in American neighborhoods. Maybe it’s the popularity of air conditioning, maybe it’s a certain snobbery of the kind that has put ersatz châteaux in every upscale new development of our day. I’ll tell you this: I wouldn’t trade my screen porch for a bank of Palladian windows, a score of fake pillars and all the white brickwork in modern suburbia.
Spending time on a screened porch is just like being outside, only better. Mosquitoes can’t plague you, flies can’t dive-bomb your food, and wasps are only of academic interest when you’re sequestered behind the screens. You can have a fan breezing things up, a toaster on the table and a good reading light.
Weather — we laugh at weather. The abrupt thunderstorm that sends deck-sitters and terrace-dalliers running for the back door is just background music on the roof of your screened porch. You can sit there, feet up, head dry, and smell the ozone, watch the light show and revel in a secure shelter where nothing can rain on your parade.
Since the outside is kept outside where it belongs, you can fling the inner doors wide and let the breezes blow deep into the recesses of your home. This kind of air circulation keeps the curtains fluttering and your fingers off the thermostat.
A screened porch is best attached on one hand to your kitchen, proximate to important liquid refreshments that prevent dehydration — iced tea and lemonade, seltzer, coffee and wine. On the other hand should be a garden, so when you lounge in the wicker rocker or have morning coffee at the table, a tapestry of plants is spread at your feet.
You can sit over lunch and watch spiders spin their webs, bees bustle in the flowers and butterflies work their way across the garden in herky-jerky flight. You can dine with vistas of sunset and moon rise. You can smell the roses without getting out of your robe or into your slippers.
Screens keep the bugs at bay and the view open. - General Wesc/CC
A screened porch, hung with baskets of flowers, makes an excellent wildlife blind, and creatures will approach who would otherwise shy away from your too obvious presence.
From my porch, I’ve seen a doe with three dappled fawns ease onto the lawn, a ring-necked pheasant stalk the hedgerow, a red-tailed hawk nail a rabbit and a raucous murder of crows gather to discuss the leftovers. I’ve watched cardinals and wrens feed their fledglings, hummingbirds in aerial combat and opossums slinking around in the dusk. When darkness falls, we light the candles, count the fireflies, keep time with the katydids, listen for owls.
You think you may not have such action out there in your backyard? How would you know, unless you are encouraged to sit a while, at your ease, and just watch what happens? The television gets lonely at my place during porch season.
Screened porches are terrific places to summer house plants, to daydream over garden catalogs, to consider whether the lawn needs mowing. My floor-to-ceiling screens are covered over in fall with Plexiglas panels, and life on the porch continues — it can still be pleasant on sunny winter afternoons.
As spring approaches, the porch is where I force my bulbs, and where I start my seeds. Since the door is never locked, it’s where I have mail order plants delivered, and where I keep them until out in the garden or cold frame they go.
It’s only in the heart of winter that the porch is unappealing. Fireplace season is the yin to this yang, and snuggled beside my hearth with the bird feeders in view, I’m equally happy. But ‘til then, a screened porch is the best thing a gardener can have besides a garden. ’Til then, you know where to find me.