The blister was on the pad of my right hand, just below the thumb, and it came up within about ninety seconds.
It was a Tuesday in mid-July, twenty past eight in the morning, in a garden in Chandler, just outside Phoenix. I had gone out to drag my sister’s hammock stand into the shade of the house before the sun came round. I gripped the powder-coated steel crossbar with a bare hand, the way you would grip a wheelbarrow handle, and let go about a second later. The metal had been sitting in direct sun since sunrise. It was hot enough to mark me.
That is a mildly embarrassing thing to admit. What makes it worse is that six months earlier I had built a spreadsheet ranking all fifty American states by how good they were for backyard relaxation, and Arizona had come out first.
How I Built The Index
I should explain why a bloke from Reading was ranking American states in the first place.
My sister moved to Arizona in 2019. Every time we spoke, she described a garden that sounded like a holiday brochure, and every time I looked out at my own strip of lawn behind a 1930s semi, in the rain, I felt a specific kind of envy. So I did what people who work with numbers do when they are jealous. I made it into a project.
The index was not complicated. I pulled the 1991 to 2020 station normals from NOAA’s US climate normals dataset. I scored each state on four things: annual sunshine hours, the number of days with a mean temperature in a comfortable band, annual rainfall, and median residential lot size. I weighted sunshine heaviest, because sunshine was the thing I did not have.
Arizona won. Florida was second, then Texas, then southern California. Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania sat down near the bottom, penalised for cloud and short seasons. I sent it to my sister as a joke, and she put it on the fridge.
Then I bought her a hammock and stand for her birthday, on the strength of my own ranking, and flew out the following July to see it.
What The Index Could Not See
In eleven months, the hammock had been used four times.
Four. I counted, because I asked, and my sister has the kind of memory that produces exact answers to questions like that. Twice in November, once at Christmas when my parents visited, once in March.
Here is what my spreadsheet had not modelled. The average July maximum in Phoenix under the current normals is around 41°C, and the average overnight low sits near 29°C. Those are not numbers that describe a place where you lie outside in the afternoon. They describe a place where you go from an air-conditioned house to an air-conditioned car. The garden was beautiful and almost entirely theoretical for four months of the year. The stand had been positioned once, on delivery, in the sunniest part of the plot, because that is where the photograph in the listing had it.
Meanwhile, my brother-in-law mentioned in passing that a colleague of his in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was out in a hammock most evenings from May through to September. Michigan had come 38th on my index.
I had measured sunshine. What I actually wanted to measure was comfort, and those two things stop being correlated somewhere around 28°C. Public health guidance in Britain makes the same distinction: the UK Health Security Agency advises staying out of the sun between 11 am and 3 pm during hot spells and seeking shade rather than exposure. Every hour I had scored as a point in favour of Arizona was, in practice, an hour indoors.
Same Mistake, Repeated In A Reading Back Garden
The properly humbling part came later, at home.
I came back from that trip with a burnt hand and a theory, and then I put my own hammock stand in the sunniest corner of my own garden, at the top end, against the south-facing fence. I did it for exactly the reason my sister had. Sun equals good. It is such an obvious instinct in this country that I did not notice I was following it.
I used it perhaps six times in the first summer.
Two problems, neither of which appeared in any product description. The first was wind. That corner sits in a gap between the house and next door’s garage, and it funnels. A hammock in a light breeze is pleasant. A hammock in a channelled gust swings, and swinging that you did not ask for is not restful. The second was ground. After a wet fortnight in August, the four feet of the stand had sunk into the turf, leaving rectangular scars, and the frame had racked slightly out of square. It never quite sat right again.
The following spring I moved it about seven metres, to a patch near the bottom of the garden that gets direct sun until roughly two in the afternoon and then falls into the shade thrown by a neighbour’s ash. I put two 450mm paving slabs under the feet.
That summer I used it most weeks from May to September, and a fair few evenings in October.
Nothing about the product changed. I moved it seven metres and put it on something solid.
Shade Is The Number That Matters
If I were rebuilding the index now, sunshine hours would not be the headline variable. Shade availability would be.
This is a boringly practical thing to work out, and almost nobody does it. Stand in your garden at 2 pm on a clear day in June and photograph it. Do the same at 5 pm and at 7 pm. Three photographs will tell you more about where a hammock belongs than any amount of climate data, because what you are looking for is a spot with sun early, shade late, and shelter from the prevailing wind.
The RHS has good practical guidance on creating shade in a garden, from pergolas and shade sails through to multi-stemmed trees, and it makes a point worth sitting with: mature tree canopies can lower air temperature at ground level by a very substantial margin. If you do not have shade, you can build it, and that is a cheaper intervention than moving house or moving country.
The other thing worth knowing is how little garden time it actually takes to matter. A study of nearly 20,000 people in England found that spending around two hours a week in nature was associated with better self-reported health and wellbeing, and that it made no difference whether that came in one long session or several short ones. Two hours a week is achievable in Rotherham in April. It does not require Arizona. It requires somewhere you actually want to sit.
There is also a decent physiological reason a hammock outperforms a garden chair for this. Researchers at the University of Geneva put volunteers through full nights on a bed rocking gently at 0.25Hz and found they fell asleep faster, spent longer in deep sleep and woke less often than on a stationary night. The slow lateral motion is doing something. That is the bit the product photography never explains, and it is the bit that is actually true.
Stand Is The Part You Should Actually Be Assessing
Retail listings for hammocks with a stand almost always lead with the hammock: the weave, the width, the colour of the fabric. The frame gets a line near the bottom. Having now owned two, I would reverse that order entirely, because the hammock is the part you will enjoy and the stand is the part that determines whether you enjoy it at all.
Four things I did not check the first time.
- Footprint versus hammock length. My hammock is 2.2m. The stand is 3.3m end to end. That extra metre is not optional, and it is not obvious from a photograph taken at an angle. The ONS puts the median garden for a British house at 188 square metres, falling to 140 in London, and around one household in eight has no private or shared garden at all. In a garden six metres wide, a 3.3m frame is a significant object. Measure the space, then measure it again with a tape laid on the grass.
- Weight, which is really a proxy for whether you will ever move it. Mine is about 19kg, and I can shift it alone, badly, in two goes. A friend bought a heavier hardwood arc stand at around 34kg. It has been in the same position for three years. If the whole argument for a freestanding hammock is that it can follow the shade, a frame you cannot lift has quietly stopped being a freestanding hammock.
- Ground contact. Four narrow steel feet on a wet British lawn will sink. Slabs, a gravel pad or a paved area solve this for a few pounds and protect the frame geometry.
- Where it lives in winter. This sounds trivial. It is the single strongest predictor of whether a hammock survives. Mine goes into a garage twelve steps from where it stands, so it goes away in November. The same object stored in a shed at the far end of a long garden tends not to.
What Happens When You Leave It Out
Storage is not just tidiness. Wooden stands in particular do not enjoy standing outdoors through repeated wet winters, and the failure mode is not cosmetic.
In 2008, around 30,000 wooden hammock stands sold in the US were recalled after the timber deteriorated outdoors and broke, with roughly 50 reports of stands failing and a dozen injuries requiring medical attention, including one set of fractured ribs. That is a specific product from a specific era, and it is not an argument against wooden stands. It is an argument for treating a hammock stand as a load-bearing structure rather than as furniture, which means checking the stated weight limit, inspecting bolts and end fittings at the start of each season, and not assuming that something which held you last August is fine in April.
Questions I Ask Now
If a friend asked me today, I would not send them a ranking. I would ask five things.
Where does the shade fall in your garden between four and eight in the evening, which is when you will actually use it? Can you reach that spot without going through a gate or up a step? Is the ground firm, or can you make it firm? Can you lift the frame on your own? And when it rains for a week in September, is putting it away a two-minute job or a twenty-minute one?
Answer those and the product decision mostly resolves itself. Gathered-end fabric hammocks tend to be more stable and pack down smaller than spreader-bar designs, which sit flatter and look better but are easier to tip if you get in carelessly. Synthetic fabrics dry faster than cotton, which matters more in Berkshire than it does in Barcelona. Powder-coated or galvanised steel handles damp better than untreated timber. None of that is secret knowledge. It is just further down the page than the photograph.
A More Honest Index
I still have the spreadsheet. I have not updated it, because I no longer think the question it was answering is a useful one.
The premise of a “best states” ranking is that climate is destiny, and the thing that actually undid mine was learning that climate is a constraint, not a determinant. The states I scored highest have a heat problem in the months you most want to be outside. The states I scored lowest have four or five genuinely excellent months and people who use them properly. And Britain, which would have finished somewhere below West Virginia, has around 30 million domestic gardens and an evening light in June that goes on until half past nine.
If you want to compare your own conditions honestly, the Met Office publishes long-term climate averages by station, and you can look up your nearest one in about a minute. It will tell you less than you think. The three photographs of your own garden will tell you more.
I got a blister from a spreadsheet. Take the pictures instead.
