Mother's Rustic Pergola
(Page 2 of 13)
February/March 1998
By the Mother Earth News staff
The main difference between a 20-year and 100-year outdoor structure is the integrity of is joints. See pages 70-76 for our guide to the best an old-fashioned near—wild rambling rose. Over the summer, I'd mount two or three hanging baskets of flowers or vining vegetables in the front. In another age, one might mistake it for a bower, the sort of woodsy shelter where nymphs, dryads, shepherds, and fair country maids were forever trysting in classical literature.
RELATED CONTENT
If you like the look of rustic and rugged furniture, then this show-and-tell is for you, including ...
Build one or more of these easy-to-build, attractive outdoor benches, from mail-order plans: a log ...
One of the best ways to make your yard and garden more enjoyable is to provide several spots where ...
MOTHER'S SUPER-HEAVY BENCH (OR VISE, OR BIRDBATH, OR TABLE) STAND: BUILD IT IN ONE HOUR FROM "JUNK"...
Making an indoor-outdoor garden center from wood and peg board, including diagrams, instructions, m...
The classical idiom hasn't much resonance these days, alas. "Your browser or mine?" "Send me an e-mail" is more like it. I'd eschew the romance and build a strictly practical garden—shed type pergola in sturdy American rustic style from the saplings I was hauling out of the woods as I cleared space for the meandering paths, sunny meadow spots, and watery grottos of a woodland garden. Any lost naiads could go there to tryst with the resident wood sprites.
Timber Choices
Our little piece of New England woods is mountainside second-growth, having been selectively logged at least twice since first settled in the late 1700s. As in much cut-over North American woodland, it contains a variety of mature hard and soft woods left by old-time loggers to serve as grandfather or seed trees, plus enough young and middle-aged hardwoods to provide a cord of firewood per acre for the foreseeable future. Where filtered sunlight finds ground in the thinner stands of timber, there's a thicket of undergrowth: runty shade-tolerant shrubs, and understory: gangly young trees competing for limited soil space and sun energy. Too small to be harvested for firewood, all but a tiny fraction will just naturally be shaded out while still small to molder back into forest loam-unless they are harvested for rustic structures such as our pergola.
Even if you haven't managed to move onto your own share of the woods just yet, you can find a pergola's worth of unwanted young trees in most any untended stretch of countryside: along fence and property lines, in vacant lots, abandoned farm fields and beside country roads everywhere. Indeed, State and County road crews and utility company linemen cut out acres of roadside "trash wood" each year before it grows tall enough to interfere with the snow plows or power lines. Scouting county roads in spring and fall can reveal rafts of rustic building wood laid out on the roadside berm just waiting to be collected before the chipper arrives to convert them to mulch. Or, with the landowner's permission, you can do the road workers a favor and fell your own. Take a good set of loppers along with your light—duty chain saw, and cut up the slash—the limbs and tops—into pieces small enough they disappear in the roadside vegetation.
If you've a choice of tree species, pick a cedar if they are native to your area. Eastern or Western, red or white cedar are all good. Often called arborvitae or juniper, and technically softwoods, these conical evergreens produce a tough and elastic wood that is laced with aromatic resins that serve as natural insect and mold repellents for the tree in its lifetime, and provide the fragrant wood used to line cedar chests and closets where it naturally repels moths from wool clothing stored during the warm months. Though trimming off a cedar's full skirt of small, prickly needle-covered limbs is a chore, fences and outdoor structures made from the trunks will remain sound many years longer than hardwoods. Indeed, most any evergreen will outlast oak, maple, or hickory in outdoor use-unless the hardwoods are treated periodically with preservatives.
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
Next >>
