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I gotta tell you about my first glimpse of northern European garden houses. It was from a train between Hamburg and Itzehoe, Germany. It was the last leg of a trip that had started in Nashville, Tennesee. We left Atlanta, flew to Brussels, Belgium, spent the night. The next day we took the train through Aachen to Cologne where we changed trains to go north to Hamburg. Out the window, along the tracks, was a field of garden plots and little shacks. Unfortunately I completely misunderstood. I thought it was a German slum. The little houses were constructed of scraps of wood, canvas, shingle, sheet metal, old doors and windows. The garden plots, with their equally creative fences, were as neat and tidy as could be imagined, but the garden sheds seemed to outdo one another in dilapidation. A few days later, after seeing that every other part of Schleswig Holstein, the northern state of Germany, was as clean and neat as anywhere I’d ever been, I asked some friends about the little “slum” I’d seen from the train. That’s when I learned that the little houses were for getting out of town, for relaxing, tending gardens, storing tools or just taking a nap. How cool. Notice that these Swedish garden houses do not, in any way, match the description above. Photograph courtesy of Franz Bauer. | |||||
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