Chad wants to get a swimming pool. My first response was essentially a hard no, but the more I think about, the more I wonder if I can get on board. See, my primary concern is that it a pool will take away from the outdoor living space that we’ve worked hard to establish, dominating the area and making it harder to use for gardening. But who’s to say that a pool can’t be integrated into the landscape?
There’s the question of pool fencing, of course. But if you went for frameless glass and place a bunch of agapanthus plants or something around it… it could start to work. I know agapanthus won’t exactly hide the fence, but their soft stems would mean that visiting kids won’t use them as a climbing frame to get over the pool fence.
A dwarf lemon tree in a tub, or perhaps a cumquat, is something that I’ve been wanting to get, and it seems likely to grow well alongside a pool, what with the open access to sun and all that. That reminds me – I must remember to go and grab that fruit tree netting from Sadie; the bats have been going to town on the figs again.
Back to the topic at hand, though. What will a pool really bring to the space, in terms of day-to-day experience? There are some legitimate answers to that. For starters, Chad loves swimming for exercise. To serve that purpose, though, you’d need a pretty lengthy pool and, like I said, I’m not down with it dominating the garden. Maybe a lap pool is the way to go, in which case, maybe it can work with some hedge plants around it, outside the fence.
Ultimately, it could add a lot of value to the outdoor space in terms of daily use over summer, when it generally gets far too hot during the day to want to be outdoors for purely recreational reasons – gardening in high summer does not count as recreation in my book, but swimming passes muster.