Full Monty: the joy of eating outdoors

Eating alfresco in summer may be more of an exception than the rule for Monty, but be prepared for when the occasion does arise

Two garden seats arrived at Longmeadow and on the same day I heard Sarah Raven – who is right about most things – say that the best time to plant outdoor tomatoes was “when it was warm enough to eat supper outside”.

For all I know, you may be reading this in the second week of a blistering heatwave, but it is a rare summer that we can eat outside most evenings. For the most part, eating one’s evening meal outside, sipping that last glass as the light is replaced by a warm, velvety dusk, is the memorable exception rather than any kind of rule. Which potentially makes planting out tomatoes a bit of a lottery, but I know what Sarah means. There is a point somewhere around the beginning of June when the evenings ought to be warm enough to eat outside and only the perversity of the English summer is thwarting that plan – and that is tomato-planting time.

But for tomato planting you must have a bed to plant them into and for alfresco dining you must have seats. Hence our benches. There are a number of unusual factors to them. They are a matching pair, which is, I think, a first in the Don household. We have always tended to buy furniture, for indoors or out, very second hand – recycled, upcycled, occasionally down-cycled. Sarah once bought the base of a 60,000 gallon oak barrel that was being dismantled by a local cider maker, when it changed to the more practical but much less romantic steel vats. It made for a lorry load of beautifully coloured oak boards that we used for an interior wall in the house, for the book cases behind me as I write this, as well as others all over the house – which, incidentally, smelt strongly of cider for months afterwards. We sleep on a bed we made from metal piping, go upstairs by a staircase we moved 20 years ago, only intending to leave it in place for a week or two but still there tied ‘temporarily’ by the same bit of old rope, and the garden sheds are clad in corrugated iron discarded by local farmers.

So the rather smart pair of Lutyens-style benches is a departure, to say the least – but a welcome one. For a start, they are comfy. They also fit well into the area by the herb garden that catches the evening sun. We intended them for the Jewel Garden, but carried them as far as that bit near the house where we plonked them for an evening and they have taken root. The point is that somewhere to sit in the garden is essential, even if you, like Sarah and I, find yourselves using them much less than you intended or even hoped.

I have certain criteria for eating outside, of which by far the most important is that you must have sunshine but the butter should not melt. This means knowing where the sun falls at the times of day when you are most likely to eat and going there, rather than expecting the sun to come to you just because that is where your table and chairs happen to be. Breakfast needs as many morning rays as possible, lunch should always be sheltered or else it will be too bright and hot, and, like breakfast, an evening meal or drink should be catching the force of the falling light, albeit from the other side of the sky.

The logic to this is that every garden should have three quite distinct sitting and eating locations – which is fine and dandy for those with a largish garden, but can be a stretch for a small plot. In our London garden, I would drink a meditative cup of tea outside the back door in the thin early light and then in the evening we would sit right at the end of the garden, catching the sun as it reached the western rim of the London sky, which made for a procession from kitchen to table carrying food on trays down the path between the borders. No one spot can ever be right for all the different possible mealtimes of the day, so when you most want to sit and enjoy eating, drinking or just being quiet, outside will dictate where you do it.

Mind you, this need not mean having different sitting places all over the garden. We have placed our two new fancy seats facing each other (conveniently socially distanced), one looking into the dawn and the other facing the last of the summer light, so I can make the best of all available light with a modest shift before going off to plant out my tomatoes.

No one spot can ever be right for all the possible mealtimes of the day