sustainable planting design
Given the climatic changes that our planet experiences, we need to reflect on the way our gardens and green environments are created and built.
In response to growing concerns about environment, the Society of Garden Designers issued a manifesto in 2022, that encouraged its members, and everyone involved in building gardens and landscapes, to pursue a more sustainable approach.
There are several practices that we can apply to create more environmentally friendly planting design.
To create a more sustainable garden it is important to reduce the areas for hardscape elements and try to increase the amount of space that is allocated for planting plants.
Another important concept is to work with what is already present on site, either old brick, pieces of pavement, concrete slabs. All of these materials could be re-purposed.
If possible, you should also re-use containers, for example old ceramic or terracotta pots, where a beautiful herbal garden can be created.
When thinking about a sustainable planting design it is important to look carefully at the soil and work with it. There is no need for buying bulk amounts of compost or soil improver, if your soil is for example sandy. Work with sand! There are many types of beautiful plants that will happily grow in this soil conditions in your garden. You just need to research the right ones.
This approach will not only reduce the cost of your garden design project, but will also reduce its impact on the environment.
To create a sustainable planting design, it is important to focus on preserving the plants that are already present on site.
Hastate Design’s strap line: gardens gently edited captures this design approach which we use for existing gardens: meaning we gradually introduce new plants and gently edit what is already present.
When introducing new plants into a garden, you need to first think about how they will relate to the wider garden context and the landscape that surrounds it.
You might want to repeat the species that you have already seen in the wild, outside your enclosed garden space.
Sustainable planting design should also focus on the types of plants that will come back year after year. The best examples are perennial plants and there are many fantastic types of perennials that will suit a wide variety of garden habitats.
Perennial plants are not only more sustainable option for your garden, but will create a fantastic display of colours and structures, as they will change the appearance as the season progresses, with many flowering during the winter period.
Making your planting design more sustainable also means, that the need for the maintenance should be minimal. This not only saves the recourses (human, water), but by maintaining less, and creating plantings that are more on the wild (messy) side, it will benefit the wildlife more.
This aesthetic at first might seem very challenging to a human eye that has been trained to appreciate today’s view of what a garden should look like. But is definitely worth adopting, with the reward being more species of insects and birds visiting the planting and more natural garden that you created.
It is also important to stop tidying up the plantings and gardens for winter, and stop cutting back all the beautiful winter structures and skeletons of plants. They will act as a shelter for birds and insects and will provide food.
Creating a sustainable planning design requires being much more in tune with nature and your surrounding landscape, understanding it, observing, listening to it.
This is by far more enjoyable and mentally calming process, which contrasts sharply with the common approach of stripping back all of the vegetation to the bare land and building an ‘immediate garden’, dominated by hardscaping.
Today, it is important more than ever , that we adopt gentler and more environmentally aware approach to both creating and maintaining our green spaces.