Usage
Because of weather constraints it is usual to use a garden more in the summer than in the winter, although some usages are traditional, such as for a bonfire on Bonfire Night, 5 November. Similarly daytime usage is more common than nighttime.
Functionally, it may be used for:
- Growing food
- Playing games
- Relaxing and sunbathing
- Raising plants
- Housing pets
- Drying clothes
- Making a compost heap
- Hobbies
- Locating a greenhouse, conservatory, shed, workshop, outhouse, or garage (if access to a highway is possible)
- Partying
- Wildlife refuge
- Safe area for children
- Location of an air raid shelter such as the Anderson shelter of World War II
Its functional and recreational use is so varied, that it cannot be easily categorised, in fact. Many of the freedoms of the use of the back garden come from the restrictions, social or legal of what are not done in the front.
Usually, clothes are not dried, vegetables are not grown, and sunbathing is not carried out in a front garden. All these can happen in the privacy of the back garden.
Traditionally, people treat a back garden as private to themselves, and not those they are neighbours to. The social etiquette of how one can greet and interact one's neighbours may be complex and defined by many informal social rules.
In some areas talking to one's neighbours over the back wall (the side wall following the property boundary line) is usual, and is a welcome form of neighbourliness, in other places it is not.
Read more about this topic: Back Garden
Famous quotes containing the word usage:
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—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1951)
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—Kenneth G. Wilson (b. 1923)