The environment is on everyone’s minds, so it should be. If you have a garden, you have a great opportunity to contribute to protecting our natural world by making it an environmentally friendly garden.
What does an environmentally friendly garden look like, and what features does it have?
You might imagine an environmentally friendly garden as being untamed, over grown and teeming with wildflowers and insects, but in this day and age even the most contemporary garden design can be environmentally friendly thanks to a combination of ethically sourced materials and technology. Green Onion Landscaping can help you plan and design your environmentally friendly garden.
Whether you’re an avid gardener or you’ve just started gardening, you can adapt your garden for it to be a more environmentally friendly garden. Gardening is already great for our environment, however, little changes in how we approach cultivating our gardens can have huge benefits to our environment and our lives.
RECYCLE AND REUSE MATERIALS
Go green by using recycled materials in your garden design. Reclamation yards can be great places to source hard landscaping materials, have a really good look around at car boot sales, on Facebook market place, Gumtree, Freebies or junk shops for materials. Old tin baths, coloured glass bottles, old wooden ladders and buckets, old scaffolding boards, chests of drawers can all be put to good use in a eco friendly garden. Recycling materials gives you the opportunity to get creative, bringing lots of character and charm to your garden setting. Re-using old items also enables you to create an identity for your garden, something bespoke to you. Old hand-made clay bricks from reclamation yards work perfectly with Victorian terraced houses, for example or turning an old copper pot into a water feature.
Use materials such as paving made from recycled concrete aggregate which is now widely available, or recycled plastic decking that is moulded to look like real wood. These are much better for the environment. Many companies sell pots, fencing and furniture made from recycled wood and plastic. There’s also an abundance of businesses that now sell fencing and furniture made from recycled wood and plastic.
CONSERVE WATER
This is essential. Install a water butt on every down pipe – you can choose weathered oak barrels or the ubiquitous green plastic cylinder barrels. Don’t use a sprinkler on the garden – water the roots of plants, repair leaking pond liners, use larger pots for plants ( they don’t dry out as quickly) and don’t mow your lawn too low in hot weather.
USE PERMEABLE PAVING
Water run-off from printed concrete drives or concrete-covered gardens in both towns and cities causes localised flooding, this affects our wildlife hugely and significantly. To tackle this problem, local councils have introduced legislation to regulate the use of solid surfaces in front gardens. You must now use permeable surfacing materials. If you plan to build a driveway larger than 5m² with impermeable materials like regular block paving, tarmac or printed concrete you’ll need planning permission unless it’s designed to drain into a lawn or flowerbed, which is not always possible. Gravel or slate chippings are the obvious permeable alternative to solid paving, however there are lots of other materials available, for example, porous asphalt and block paving to grass reinforced with recycled plastic grids.
Always call in a professional landscaper if you’re not a competent DIYer. Driveways need a substantial sub-base, usually with a proper edge, and permeable materials must be laid correctly and carefully to work effectively.
CUT BACK ON CHEMICALS
Employ natural methods to combat pests in your garden
Natural pest control:
- Rid plants of greenfly by using a strong jet of water to knock them off
- Copper rings for slug control
- Pick young caterpillars off plants or, cover your plants with garden fleece or fine Environ mesh netting
- Garlic, elder and rhubarb leaf sprays control garden pests
- Leave messy garden corners untouched for hedgehogs and slow-worms
- Put up bird boxes to attract nesting birds to help with caterpillar control
- Grow dill and fennel to entice greenfly-munching hover flies
- Build a small wildlife pond. This will attract all sorts of insects, frogs and newts
Companion planting:
- Onions and chives grown around roses will help combat black spot disease
- Grow carrots and leeks together to repel each other’s pests
- French marigolds will keep aphids off your tomatoes
- Grow basil to make tomatoes taste better
- Plant horseradish near your potatoes to increase their resistance to diseaseIf you want to create an organic garden choosing the best plants is an important design tool. In an eco-friendly garden the plants should provide food and shelter, creating habitats for wildlife. Berry producing plants and trees are best, for example Hawthorn – birds and insects will visit your garden more frequently if you grow these.
Hedges are certainly better than walls. Hedges provide ideal nesting sites for birds and hedgehogs and give protection from predators. Nectar-rich, open-faced flowers such as Echinacea and Buddleia will make a difference. These are much better than modern double flowers that don’t have proper nectaries to feed garden-friendly insects.
Encouraging wildlife in your garden makes it much more interesting, as well as helping with pest control – slug-eating hedgehogs and slow-worms love piles of leaves and logs. Attract birds that help with caterpillar control, put up nesting boxes and put out a variety of food. Song thrushes love dried fruit, blackbirds adore rotten apples, and sunflower seeds will attract chaffinches and blue tits.
Open faced flowers entice bees, choose bright, showy blooms that flower throughout the year. Waking the Bees in spring can be done with wallflowers, aubrietia and rosemary these are all great pollen and nectar sources. In summer, Catmint, Lavender, Skimmia and Thyme are excellent. Flowering Ivy in autumn is great for Bees. And finally to help solitary bees, a special bee hotel provides the very best nesting site.
