Carrying on with my ongoing attempt to find residential landscaping inspiration from various exotic locations AROUND THE WORLD, I just want to get Iceland out of the way, because of all the places I've been, it is by far the hardest to transmogrify into something applicable to a residential landscape back home. It's not as if I'm going to tell you they plant their trees in the ground leaves first, or something mind-blowingly crazy like that, no, it's that residential homes occur so disparately around the island, and are surrounded by such breathtaking natural beauty, that the landscaping game is fundamentally different here. It more involves incorporating one's home into nature, or with a view of something naturally spectacular, rather than trying to create these things from scratch, the way we might in Dallas.

Even most of the waterfalls you'll encounter in Iceland are on such an epic scale that they hardly qualify as a possible inspiration for a water feature at your own home. However, there is another relationship to water that I found to be uniquely Icelandic, and that is what I'm calling their Hot Tub Culture. No, this is not a petri dish full of all the gross things that live inside a hot tub, rather it is an entire leisure culture centered around friends and family sitting around together in various types of warm water puddles.

When confronted with overwhelming number of activities that involved hot springs, bath houses, and even residential hot tubs, it occurred to me that young people in cold-climate locales, where beaches and pool parties aren't really an option, still need a plausible excuse to get half-naked together in a socially acceptable way: Enter their obsession with hanging out together in hot springs and tubs. Therefore, my only recommendation for how to bring a LITTLE PIECE OF ICELAND back home to your residential landscape in America is to install yourself a good, old-fashioned jacuzzi in your backyard. When people accuse you of being trashy, you can simply explain that you are actually incorporating international influences and culture into your life; you aren't inviting them to get naked with you in a sleazy jacuzzi, you are inviting them into your fancy Icelandic heitur pottur.

Which just happens to look a lot like a swinger's jacuzzi.

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I wish I'd known my partner SETH back when I was in Iceland, because he now has the PERFECT OUTFIT. I wonder how Iceland feels about public CLOTHING-OPTIONAL HOT TUBS?