How green is my sofa? New surveys in Britain have found that an increasingly sedentary population is getting progressively fatter, lazier and more unhealthy every year, due partly to the lousy food that people eat, and the discovery that the average family spends up to 43 hours every week planted in front of the idiot box, even in the height of summer.

Admittedly, English summers can be shorter and cooler than most, but the essential point is that even on a lovely summer's day, many of the Queen's loyal taxpayers would rather watch it on TV than get outside and experience the real thing.

In an effort to help redress the situation, the English National Trust has come up with the idea of designing and constructing a series of outdoor 'lawn sofas'.

If they can't get the population off their backsides, they might as well see if they can get them to lounge around outdoors, goes the theory.

After trying a variety of materials, 10 different sized lawn sofas were constructed out of a base of straw bales lashed together with hessian matting, and then upholstered in around 20 square metres of lawn turf.

Expert National Trust gardeners were called in to help cut and shape the lawn turf, which then required just a night or two out in the English summer rain to knit things together.

Flushed with success, the National Trust also constructed a couple of lawn coffee tables to fit alongside the sofas, and finished off the displays with the construction of a giant-sized lawn sofa to be displayed in Osterley Park, London, that required 100 square metres of turf and 50 straw bales to build.

Whether the new lawn sofas will be enough to stop the general population going to seed, only time will tell.

(Images courtesy of National Trust and Curb.)
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