Improve Your Garden With a Garden Seat

If you'd like to relax in your garden, a garden bench or garden seat could be just the thing you need.  There are many different styles and materials available for garden benches.  Among the most popular are stone, wrought iron, and wood.  The garden seat you choose will be based on your needs, price range, and aesthetics.  Here's some basic information about the major kinds of garden seats to help you figure it out.

Stone garden benches are popular, being sturdy and durable.  They're also very heavy, which means that you should decide early if you want a garden bench that you can move around.  Stone garden benches may be made from slabs, carved stone, or a kind of synthetic material called cast stone.  They're relatively low maintenance, since you can dust or hose them off when they get dirty.

One big downside to stone garden benches is that they're expensive.  Just how much a stone bench will cost depends on what kind of stone it's made of, and how much work went into creating it.  A carved bench in marble will cost much more than a cast granite bench.  If you don't have a local retailer of stone benches for your garden, the cost could go up a lot.  Shipping stone is very expensive, since it's both heavy, and easily broken in transit.  If you don't like in an area where a stone bench is easily available, you may wish to consider another material.

Wrought iron benches have the classic air of another age.  Although iron can rust, most wrought iron has additives and treatments applied that allow it to resist corrosion.  A wrought iron bench will be sturdy and take a lot of abuse.  However, like stone benches, wrought iron models can be quite heavy.  They may also require assembly on delivery.  Wrought iron is sensitive to temperature changes, so it can feel very hot if it's been exposed to direct sunlight, or cold if the air is chilly.

While wrought iron is resistant to corrosion, it may still discolor with exposure to the elements.  Generally this discoloration occurs all over, instead of in patches, which means that some people find it to be a desirable part of their bench's aging process.  However, if you want you bench to stay the same color as it was when you got it, surface treatments may be needed.  Wrought iron, like stone, is hard to ship.  This means you ought to buy any wrought iron garden seat from a local retailer if it's at all possible.

The third major option in functional garden furniture is wood.  Wooden garden benches don't have the same long life as stone or wrought iron benches.  However, they're much lighter, and correspondingly cheaper.  Most of us don't actually need our garden furniture to outlast us, so a wooden garden seat often does the job.  The majority of wood benches are finished without paint, so that the beauty of the wood grain can show through.  If you like to move your garden furniture around, wood is probably the best choice.  A wooden garden seat is much lighter than stone or wrought iron.  You can also order a wooden bench online without having to worry about exorbitant shipping costs.  No matter what garden bench you choose, be sure to shop around for the best deals.  A little bit of planning could save you a lot of money.