A delivery driver said it first, actually, dumping a wooden planter on the porch and going “oh that’s nice, that’ll look proper expensive once it’s grayed out a bit.” Which set off a fight that is technically still ongoing. Half the office wants that gray, weathered, driftwood thing to happen as fast as possible. The other half is horrified at the idea of paying real money for wood and then just letting the weather have its way with it, and has taken to covering theirs with a bit of old tarp every time rain is forecast, which defeats the purpose of owning a wooden anything, but here we are.
The showroom versions always look like they’ve never met actual weather, sitting there golden and honey colored under a spotlight next to a fern that’s clearly fake. Ours have met weather. Ours have met a dog, two summers, one very confident squirrel who treats the planter box as a buffet table, and in one memorable case a toddler who used it as a step stool to reach the bird feeder and nearly took the whole thing down with him. None of that shows up in a showroom.
What shows up in a showroom is the idea of a planter. What you actually get is something that starts looking incredible around month four and then just keeps getting better while your patio furniture falls apart around it, which nobody warns you about, and honestly should.
We will say, because someone has to, that the cheap ones warp.
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Not dramatically. Just enough that the corners stop meeting properly and you start noticing it every single time you walk past, like a picture frame hung slightly crooked in someone else’s house.
Where the real disagreement lives is drainage, and it is more heated than it has any right to be. One camp lines everything with plastic sheeting to protect the wood from the soil, feels very smug about it, calls it common sense. The other camp thinks that’s basically defeating the entire point of buying wood in the first place and just accepts that the thing will eventually rot from the inside, gracefully, like a very slow noble death, and would rather replace it in six years than look at plastic peeking out the top for six years straight.
Put it next to brick and it goes quiet and a bit serious. Put it next to a white rendered wall and it goes almost coastal, like it’s auditioning for a beach house it’s never going to live in. Put it on gray decking, which at least two of us have done, and it just sort of disappears into the background, which might be the actual problem nobody wants to say out loud.
Somebody’s landlord walked past a planter on a balcony last spring and asked, completely deadpan, if it was going to outlive the tenancy. Rude. Also, based on the current state of it, probably yes.
