The RHS' Greening Grey Britain Campaign
is all about transforming grey
spaces into green and one of the
trickiest places to do this is in urban front gardens.
Today I'm in Greenford, West London
on a typical suburban street, the type
you would see pretty much anywhere in the country.
Where front gardens are paved over and there's a car parked in
front of pretty much every house.
It's easy to think you have to make a
choice between paving or planting in
your front garden but i'm here to meet
Malcolm who's keen to do both.
'Malcolm hi' 'hi Helen' So this is your garden.
Yes but its not much of a garden. What made
you decide to pave it? Just purely for
practical reasons I needed space to park
both of my cars. But if you
could have a dream garden what would that look like?
I still want to maintain the fact that I have got
space for two cars, but as much
plants and and greenery as possible around the edge.
Over the next few days
we're going to turn Malcolm's garden
from a grey car park into a practical
green front garden that looks lovely but
which still allows him to park both his cars.
I'm here on day two of the build to meet
Caro the designer to see just how we are
going to make this happen
Caro very nice to meet you and you too
is it easy to fit a parking space even
two onto a front garden. What we do is we
we plant absolutely everywhere that we
can so we plant around the edges, we
plant up onto the house, we plant onto the
wall behind us and even underneath the
cars. Surely the plants will just die
under a parked car? Fortunately the parked
cars move off during the day so it means
that the plants have access to light
and rainfall and we deliberately choose
plants that can cope in those sort of
a rather odd drought tolerant conditions.
I guess you've got to address things
like drainage as well? That's right
because obviously with a front garden we
don't want water rushing out onto the
pavements and into drains, so we use
permeable paving. Is this one of those
grids? Yes
so this is a recycled plastic grid and
we put gravel into the paver you don't
see the grid at all once the gravel has
gone in and then when it rains and the
water goes through the gravel and into
the soil below, if you're going to park
cars this is obviously a really solid
base and then it stops the gravel shifting around.
If gardeners wanted to do this at home in their own front garden
would they have to make all these changes?
No, the most important thing
is that they put in some plants
somewhere and if they've got hard paving that they take the hard paving up maybe
put down gravel or I would always say more plants.
It's now day five of the build and the
plants are going in, but with so many plants
to choose from it's hard to know where to begin.
Leigh you're a Horticultural Advisor at
the RHS have you got any tips for people
wanting to get the best plants for the
front garden? Yes well it's really find any
space to get some plants in so for
example we haven't gone for a wall
here down the side we've actually got a hedge
which the birds can nest in, it's got
flowers for the insects and it will help trap air pollution to.
What about all the trellis area?
We are getting climbers up there so things like Clematis and
Honeysuckle and as well as looking great
because they're going to flower in the
summer months we're going to insulate
the house so it will make it cooler in the
summertime and actually warmer in the
winter and you might save up to 15% on
your heating bills.
The other major planting area is of course under the cars
and what on earth do you do you pick for
that spot? We need really tough plants that
are going to cope with those conditions
so things like Creeping Jenny and Thymes
so rather than coming home to paving you're going
to come home to flowers, which is going
to make you feel really good too.
Well Malcolm what do you think it's
finished? It's absolutely fantastic it's
more than I ever expected and it's
they've gone far beyond whatever I
anticipated from the original plans so
it's brilliant. Great somewhere to park your
car and a garden as well. Absolutely
Malcolm's gone off to get his car but I
think it's safe to say he's thrilled
with his front garden if you'd like to
learn more about the
RHS' Greening Grey Britain Campaign get
ideas on transforming your front garden and
pledge to make a change
visit rhs.org.uk/ggb