Small House for the Cacti

It stands in the narrow strip beside the house, between the house wall and the boundary wall: paving underfoot, a water tank at the far end, sacks of soil stacked against the wall, a fine-leaved tree spreading overhead. This strip is where a cactus collection lives, everything from pots the size of a thumb up to a wide bonsai tray, and it is properly outdoors — no eave of the house reaches this far.

One piece here is ours: this house-shaped stand. Both planes of the roof are glazed, and all four sides are left wide open, with nothing to shut. Rain does not reach the pots, while air and sun still cross from any direction and nothing bakes inside. The shelves are not solid boards either. They are slats with gaps between them, so water blown in from the side — or poured on at the morning watering — drains straight through instead of standing under the pots. And the stand is shallow enough that the paved strip in front of it is still walked down the way it always was.

Nothing standing in it matches anything else: orange terracotta, brick-coloured plastic, a red seed tray, black pots from the plant shop, sizes running from a thumb to a full hand. So the stand has to do the ordering. The reclaimed teak frame is divided by uprights into bays at regular intervals and then cut down into tiers, and pots with nothing whatever in common get read as one row rather than a heap. The gable line running up to a ridge repeats the shape of the real house standing behind it. Which is why it does not look like a shelf someone carried out into the yard, but like a small house that came up in the garden of a larger one.

This one lives fully outside, with no eave of the house to cover it. Sun straight onto it all day. Bangkok rain landing on the roof and blowing in at the sides. One morning's watering wets the whole run of shelving, and soil and grit drop through the slats every day of the week. It also carries the weight of every one of those soil-filled pots, standing there all year. And someone who grows cactus does not set them down and leave them — pots are lifted out and swapped back in almost daily. So this is not furniture put outside to be looked at. It gets handled every day.