# Courtyards and Gardens **Courtyards and gardens** form the outer relieving layer of Houses: they receive air, water, sound, and some of the strain that cannot be left inside. They serve everyday life while also revealing the House’s condition before its inner rooms do. A good courtyard is not empty, yet neither is it fully incorporated into the line. ## The Courtyard Falls Ill First Plants, water, and exposed masonry respond to changes in holding sooner than interior walls do. > A house’s courtyard was not for strolling in, nor for merely passing through: the courtyard took upon itself what could not be let inside, and held within its walls that measure of breath without which the house itself could not breathe evenly; and so, in ill-favoured dolniks, the garden looked worse than the houses, and its foliage blackened before anywhere else—and good householders read in it what they could not yet read in the house itself, for a good courtyard always falls ill before its house. > > — [*The Belta and the North Stair*](page:57326) A single withered shrub proves nothing. What matters is whether the garden repeats the inner order: whether plants darken opposite one particular room, or the water changes after a family quarrel. ## Arranging the Outlet A courtyard is given a connection to the street, a separate drain, and a patch of shade belonging to no room. Trees are not planted directly opposite interior doors: their roots create too stable a path back. The well is positioned so that its sound does not enter the sleeping circles. During [relief](page:57191), the courtyard receives the excess gradually. Afterwards, fallen matter is not carried back inside for fuel or fertiliser—otherwise what was released returns in another form. ## Reading by the Master of the Wind The [master of the wind](page:57758) compares movement in the garden with the response of the rooms. If leaves and curtains move at the same time, the path is still open. If the garden remains still amid strong movement within, the connection has closed and relieving the House through the courtyard is dangerous. The gardener and the master are responsible for different things. The former knows the health of living things; the latter, the direction of what is held. Error arises when a diseased tree is mistaken for a sign from the House or, conversely, the soil is treated where the roots are carrying someone else’s memory. ## Gardens After the Rift Later schools see gardens as a possibility for life less dependent on the heavy memory of Houses. They lay out shared courtyards between several Houses and allow no line to claim them. Their opponents regard such places as channels of intermingling. The best-known dispute concerns the garden of the Six Wells: some call it the source of the settlers’ shared memory; others, the only place that kept their Houses from fully infecting one another. --- ## Links here - [Spaces of the House](page:57074) --- [All pages](https://wikilayer.org/smee-again/the-house-of-the-inner-wind/en/index.md)