Revamp your front garden
With minimal cost and effort, turn your parking area into a pretty and practical green space
More often than not, our front gardens are used as driveways – homes with cars need all the space they can get. Where once you might have grown some veg, shown off your best blooms for neighbours to admire or tucked in a little lawn, it’s now prime parking land, with more and more homes paving over precious ground.
There are about five million homes in Britain today that have no plants in their front gardens, and about seven million front gardens are concreted over. This can only have a bad effect on the environment and on our wildlife, and scientists and top gardeners alike are concerned – so how can we turn this around? Well, put a little easy effort into some front garden greenery and we can instantly improve our local spaces.
There’s another pressing reason we need to think about our green spaces – tightly packed, impermeable paving has been found to have an effect on rainfall reaching our soils, overloading drains and on flooding, so it’s now a legal requirement to get planning permission to add full impermeable paving. If you’re going to pack in the paving slabs, it’s easy to leave gaps for precious plants, which naturally slow down water overflow.
There’s also the effect plants have on their surroundings. Trees, shrubs and flowers provide fantastic food and shelter for wildlife, and make our lives better with their colour and beauty. But they’re cleverer than that, too. Many plants help cool the atmosphere, bring down hot summer temperatures around the house and filter out polluted air. You can plant a hedge and it’ll help shield you from car fumes!
If we change the way we look at our front gardens, we can reclaim them as planting areas to add on to the rest of our plot and make a huge and beautiful difference to our surroundings. You don’t need to lose your car parking space – simply plant around it. Here are some great ideas to make the best of both worlds, with a lovely garden space and a car park!