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Home and Garden

Home, strictly speaking, is synonymous to house and domicile. It is the physical structure where a person lives. Generally, home is where a person eats, bathes and sleeps. However, home does not merely refer to the physical structure. It encompasses all the people, especially family, that reside in it as well as the experiences, pleasant or otherwise, that occurred in it.

By and large, a home bespeaks of pleasant experiences, of feelings of safety and refuge. It is commonly where a person feels most comfortable in. Thus the expression "Home is where the heart is." This connotes that a person who has no loved ones doesn't have a home. It also gives the impression that with no love of family and kin, a house is not a home.

A person who considers himself to have a home is usually well adjusted and happy. The lack of such, on the other hand, can cause havoc with a person's physical, emotional and psychological state.

A home is an ideal that people aspire to having. Home has connotations that bring such feelings of warmth and happiness that retirement facilities name their establishment retirement home or home for the aged instead of retirement house or domicile for the aged.

A house, to become a home, should not merely contain furniture and rooms. It should have furniture that is constantly used by the family members or residents, and it has rooms that are lived in. Usually, illustrations of a home would include family pictures hung on the wall and framed family pictures on a mantel or side table. It also commonly includes the childish drawings and doodles taped to the refrigerator door. Whatever the furnishings, a home contains things well loved by and meaningful to its occupants.

A garden can add much to the appeal of one's home. A garden is a space, indoors or outdoors, designated for plants. A garden can be structured and thematic, or it can also be unstructured. English gardens are very structured. It was a very popular English design to arrange plants in mazelike and other geometric patterns. Some people, on the other hand, prefer letting plants grow where they will in the space allotted, then doing some minor trimmings and arranging when the plants are all grown up. Common garden designs are rectangular plots where similar or complementing plants are planted in rows.

A garden can contain flowering shrubs, trees, vegetable stock and fruit-bearing plants. It also contains a mix of natural materials and man-made elements. Thus, there will be soil and rocks and there can be man-made falls and fountains.

A garden can be an exquisite showplace. It does not belong in residential areas alone. Parks are landscaped and are like macroscopic gardens themselves. One of the most renowned gardens (and perhaps the most mysterious and intriguing because of scarce and contradicting accounts of it) is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon which was supposed to have flourished near the bank of River Euphrates and supposedly constructed by Nebuchadnezzar.