It’s time to save the great British front garden
With more of us than ever paving over lawns, Harry Mount says our love of cars can’t come at the cost of our green legacy
We Brits have long been the most obsessive gardeners in the world – but for how much longer? A new study has revealed that applications for dropped kerbs have soared in recent years, as homeowners convert their front gardens into drives instead. Twelve per cent of those surveyed had converted some or all of their front garden into a driveway – conversions being particularly popular in the capital, where 18 per cent had gone for slabs over shrubs.
In the eternal battle between front lawns and our love of the car, it seems, the automobile is winning. And, in a strange paradox, supposedly green electric cars are killing off more front gardens than ever, with eco-conscious drivers needing to park close to their front door in order to keep their motor charged.
The British still have more garden per person than people in any other country: 8,000 square miles altogether, a bigger area of land than all our national nature reserves put together. In Greater London alone, there are around 3.8 million front and back gardens, covering 37,900 hectares of domestic land, with about 2.5 million trees between them.
The knock-on effects of all this paving, however, can be catastrophic. Where earth absorbs water, concrete sends it pouring into your basement. This summer, intense rainstorms produced extensive flooding in Walthamstow, north-east London, and Holland Park, in the capital’s west. The rain that would once have soaked into the deep earth of the front garden instead sloshes into the new
We still have more lawn per person than people in any other country worldwide
subterranean cinema, leading to a perfect storm when the heavens open.
Gardening expert Bunny Guinness says that, in Peterborough, she was surprised to learn that “people in residential streets were only allowed two residents’ permits per house. That meant anyone who went over their allocation had to pave over their front garden to squeeze in another car.”
And wiping out a raft of front gardens “makes the whole street look so bare. It’s such a difference when you lose lovely plants like buddleias,” she says. “Putting in these electric chargers makes things worse.” Plus, she adds, “paving over gardens also has a terrible effect on environmental quality and the amount of insects”.
Wealthy, car-loving homeowners can install basement garages, stacking their cars underground while keeping their front gardens. But that isn’t an option for the rest of us. And, like some modern invasion of the Triffids, once the cars arrive, their shockwaves continue long after they take over the front garden.
“Plane trees give a wonderful aspect to streets,” Guinness advises. “But, once people start bringing their cars into the front garden, no one likes parking under the street trees because the birds poo on them. So then the trees go – and the birds, too.”
However small your front garden is, it can accommodate a huge range of plants, as long as you don’t give in to the four-wheeled invaders.
In Wildlife of a Garden: A Thirty-year Study, Dr Jennifer Owen described all the species she has found in her garden in Leicester. In those three decades, she has counted 474 plant species, 80 types of spider, 183 bug species, 375 types of moth and 442 kinds of beetle. All in all, the retired ecology lecturer and zoology museum curator has found 2,673 different species of flora and fauna.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The total number of insect species alone, in the average British garden, is thought to be about 10,000. Pouring concrete over your front lawn, then, is tantamount to insecticide.
We might imagine the front gardens of Blighty are fairly unexotic, but we mess around with our unique legacy at our peril: in fact, thanks to our temperate climate that can accommodate northern and southern species, they are more ecologically diverse than the lushest rainforest.
When Dr Owen returned from teaching in Uganda and Sierra Leone in the 1960s, she discovered her back garden had more butterfly species than her old tropical home – 23, with the small white the most common visitor.
If you aren’t interested in insects or flowers, then your front garden is fertile territory for vegetables. In 1974, Michael Leapman began writing One Man and His Plot, the tale of how he became a tenant of an allotment next to Brixton Prison, south London, at a time when the three-day week and energy shortages inspired many people to have a go at self-sufficiency. The same movement inspired The Good Life (1975-8), the hit BBC show, starring Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal as Tom and Barbara Good, escaping the rat race to go self-sufficient. The pandemic, too, has had an enormous effect on our desire to get greenfingered: almost three million began pruning their lawns come lockdown, with nearly half of new gardeners aged under 45; sales of products such as seeds saw a 59 per cent boost, while spend among customers increased by more than a third.
“Not many people grow vegetables in their front garden,” says Michael Leapman, who still has his Brixton allotment nearly 50 years on. “But if I had a front garden, I’d put vegetables in a pot. They’re easier to handle than in the earth. You could grow carrots, and green veg – cabbages and brussel sprouts – and lettuce. Runner beans would look quite decorative with a wigwam. And runner beans have had a very good year this year.”