Gravel gardens have been around a long time yet with a few well-known exceptions (Denmans, Beth Chatto and more recently, Olivier Filippi), never really make it into the mainstream of garden design. I suspect that for some designers, there is insufficient structure to satisfy, yet that is actually one of the main benefits. This makes them low-impact, from a carbon perspective, and naturally adaptive, with the kind of planting they use.
I have been designing such gardens for the past twenty plus years, and a part of my own garden is gravel, on the area of an old driveway; it’s the part I enjoy the most. Unlike perennial borders, there is structure all year round and I often wander around in the depths of winter, enjoying the shapes and forms, or the scent of rosemary (sorry to say, now officially Salvia). It’s like you’ve brought a little bit of the Mediterranean into the garden. Plants self-seed around and it’s always a bit different every year. It’s a style also eminently suitable for the arid regions of the Middle-East, whether xeriscaped, or not.
Not everywhere is suitable for a gravel garden and the obvious criteria of sun exposure and poor(ish), free-draining soil are a must. Whilst drainage and soil structure can be altered, aspect cannot. The other factor, frost/cold exposure is actually not such a barrier, although it will limit the plant choice a bit.
A part of the design of the gravel garden described below
Some years ago I was tasked with turning an old farmyard on the South coast of England into such a garden. The compacted rubble was on average 50cm deep, so we loosened and/or removed about 400 tons and replaced a similar amount of topsoil into slightly contoured mounds. As it was a farm, the soil was already available stacked on site and there was somewhere to remove the rubble to. We then rotovated 50cm of gravel into the mounded soil to improve drainage and planted with a range of “Mediterranean” plants. Most were from this region, with some Australian/New Zealand species, most notably Phormium (which I probably wouldn’t use today). We also built a stream and water feature, using 30 tons of boulders (glacial, so not strictly true to theme).
Adding 400 tons of soilRotovating in a thick layer of gravel
If I were doing this today, I’d leave even more of the rubble in place and blind the soil in over it. Over time I have come to realise that such conditions are an advantage, and expected by many Mediterranean plants.
Placing boulders and a stream+pond
We used a drip irrigation system for the first year of establishment, which was then switched off in the second year. A 50mm deep dressing of 20mm diameter marine shingle covered everything, including the paths, which were left from the original, compacted sub-base.
PlantingAfter One yearAfter Two yearsAfter Four years
I tracked this garden for a few years until the property changed hands and learnt some valuable lessons (as you always do), such as don’t put too many larger growing shrubs in, as the openness of the spatial structure becomes compromised. Whilst they are good at establishing initial structure, be prepared to remove some of them as the garden matures. Some, like the Cotinus and Tamarix, were meant to be coppiced every few years, but didn’t have this done. Some perennials work better than others and low mounding shrubs are what make the predominant visual structure of the site.
This last two pictures, plus the header, are a part of my own gravel garden, created over an old driveway, where I constantly experiment with new plants and slowly expand it all.
My gravel garden. Mounded foliage dominates the structural form
Gravel gardening has much to offer and is an appropriate approach for our time, being of low carbon footprint and using plants that are adaptive and generally tough. Have a go, or get me to help…!
If you work in the realm of landscapes, you cannot ignore the huge rise in
the use of artificial plants, “green” walls and especially, grass. It’s a
booming business and many companies are doing very well from it. But we should
also be hearing warning bells ringing about how damaging these things are, both
to the environment and to our individual well-being.
I’m concerned about this damage, mostly to our inner beings. I wonder if we have become unable to
comprehend that such things show our disconnection from the real. I’ve worked with plants all my life and
always my prime motive has been our connection to nature. Now I design, write, think, talk; always my
concern is for the environment and the well-being of the human spirit. This artificiality
in landscape betrays both these things.
It is not enough to say this, so I must justify it, even though the obligation should really be the other way around; people who purvey such things should have to prove that they don’t cause ill-effects. But such is the state of human consciousness that commercial profit always comes before anything else.
This is not an article about the merits of grass as such, nor what we might use as natural substitutes; that topic has been written about many times. This is about what we do to ourselves when we surround ourselves with fakery – and I don’t mean in politics, although there are parallels, doubtless.
We constantly sell ourselves short on what it is we actually need, as
individuals. This is me, an environmental designer, saying us humans should be
selfish, and demand more. But not more in material terms, in things. More in
Soul, in environmental harmony, in biophilic contact. More respect for the
awesomeness of Nature. How can we substitute the reality of Nature with
plastic, and tell ourselves it’s okay? This is self-deception on a massive scale,
and we need to be aware of it, and reject it.
Before going further on the psychological front, let’s talk about the
environment. Artificial plants are mostly made from plastic (although high end
plants may be silk). Plastic is a one-way route to pollution and there is no
difference between the plastic in a green or artificial grass and the plastic
that’s floating around in our oceans. It’s the same stuff and will end up in
landfill, being burnt or in the sea as microplastics, amongst its peers.
Grass comes in many forms, from tidy, to uncouth; the less couth, the better.
Artificial grass also is responsible for killing off the soil and its
ecosystem in areas that once were living. Even (real) lawns are of
environmental benefit, although other forms of landscape are preferable and
yield higher benefits. Yet a lawn is alive, absorbs rainwater, has a life
within of earthworms, larvae and micro-organisms, and stores a surprising
amount of carbon. Artificial lawns do the inverse of all that and are not even as
low maintenance as people think, requiring regular brushing and hosing. You must
replace it every few years, too, with rubber crumb underlay being especially problematic
to dispose of.
We buy into these products because we think we are being sold an easy life;
in fact, we are being sold a deception, that Nature can be imitated, bettered.
That you don’t have to get involved with it in any way, that the real thing
offers nothing better, that biophilia (your innate need and love of Nature) can
be mimicked. But your inner being is not deceived, just your outer one.
On the whole, we don’t realise just how disconnected we have become, in our modern
societies. Each generation has less contact with natural systems and ecologies
than the last, and each generation perceives its own experience of reality as
normal, how things are. If we could go
back 100 years, I think we’d all be astounded at the verdancy and variety of
life, of just how rich and varied Nature was.
Perhaps then we would wake up to the fact that we have forgotten our
roots and lost our way. Now, we surround ourselves with the artificial and
think that it is okay.
Landscape design doesn’t help in this respect, especially in the public
realm. Commercial space becomes
dominated by hard materials; plants, where they exist, are regimented and
ordered. Water features are devoid of
plants because they are messy, need skilled maintenance and the chemicals in
the water wouldn’t support their growth anyway.
How sad, what an opportunity missed, what absence of life in our urban landscape.
In all our striving, we should remember above all where we came from. A disconnected life allows not only the
artificial to be okay, it switches off our concern from the environmental and climate
crisis, as if we live in a bubble of man-made life, separate from the planet.
So for the sake of you own being, ditch the artificial. Embrace the messiness and verdancy of Nature,
get your hands dirty – the bacteria are good for your health and your
happiness. Let your children experience
this, teach them about that wild and somewhat frightening side of Nature, for
it needs our respect, and our love. And
if we love Nature, we might just find we can finally love ourselves.
Landscapes are all about creating micro-climate, or would be, if designed for that goal. Why is this important and what do I mean?
Almost all life is contained in a thin crust of soil, a wedge of atmospheric gases, and water. Plants are the principal medium that interacts with and regulates all three. Absolutely nothing else does this as well, or at all; think about it.
The way we organise our plants in our urban landscape will determine how well this interaction occurs, how successful it is. Yet I have never heard of a single project that has been developed with this understanding and this goal in mind. With climate change, we urgently need to re-think the way we design our landscapes, and why we design them. Whilst all the human-centric design reasons will always hold true, we need to layer into our thinking this new understanding of how plants interact. To build new ecologies, new ecosystems, we have to design for plants to actually function, rather than just look nice. For when they do this, our environment literally comes alive. More importantly, they might just, if done on sufficient scale, save us from ourselves.
When I use the word treescapes, I don’t just mean trees and grass; we’ve had that for years in the form of parks, and in their traditional form, they’ve done little for us. No, our designs need to build up layers of living material – biomass, for with biomass comes moisture entrapment, shade, food for insects, etc. Think of it in terms of height and depth of microclimate. How much depth is there in a stretch of irrigated grass, maybe 50mm above ground, 200mm below? No species variation, so what we have is little more than a green desert, albeit one that can hold bit a of moisture.
Trees in paved streets are also less able to generate micro-climate, but they are a bit of an exception, as they provide shade for people to walk under. Where width allows, even here we should layer our planting.
Trees in grass lose most of their microclimate and ecology. Traditional design fails us here.
If we replace that grass with a range of groundcover plants – not a monoculture – you begin to get a little more variation; different root structures and depth, different foliage shapes, height, form and flower. More variety, more microclimate, more food source, more ecology. Looks good too.
Next we add shrubs and suddenly we are into an new realm, that of woody plants (I’m being simplistic here, many groundcovers are of course woody). Shrubs create three-dimensional space with their frameworks, within which micro-worlds reside. Deciduous plants shed their leaves, as do evergreens, and this begins to build leaf litter – mulch. Don’t tidy it up! We need ecologies in that soil, and microbes need food. Our obsession with tidyness has a lot to answer for. Suddenly, we have height in our micro-climate, three-dimensional form. We humans (for we scale everything according to our own height and perception) can walk amongst these plants, take part, interact. Our microclimate is now two metres high, maybe more. But something is missing and it’s still too hot…
Here we have (in Umm al Emarat park, Abu Dhabi) the beginings of a true microclimate. This is a treescape.
Trees! Now we have a game changer and our micro-environment just became vast, in relative terms, maybe up to 30 metres, though 10-20m may be more average. We now have true diversity of shape, height, leaf, flower and roots. We have shade! Under trees it may be 10°C cooler and we love it. Plants love it too. Moisture now gets retained within the human habitable zone, fungi and microbes thrive in soils, insects and birds abound. This is our urban jungle and we need it. The planet needs it. This tiny sliver of crust we live on can be rich, abundant, in every climate and every place, if we put our minds to it, if we have the will. And when the planet becomes searing, creating livable environments with trees of any type, may be the only thing that keeps us alive, unless we become troglodytes.
This is the next level of landscape design, the new challenge; creating future ecologies and environments that matter, that keep us cool, that give us resources and soothe our souls. We will create new (novel) ecologies that fit the changing environment, trans-migrating parts of ecologies that once lived elswhere. In that place they may be dying out, as might your local ecology. If they now fit where you live, that’s where they need to be. In turn, that place of origin may itself need to adapt and change. In all things and all places, we need microclimate, shade and soil.
The other side of work I undertake in the Middle-East region (other than tree consultancy) is planting design, for creating new landscapes always brings me a special joy. When they are in public spaces, I love the chance it gives to interact (albeit remotely) with many people in place, over time and hopefully, enhance their enjoyment of that place. In the public realm, what that place is, is being questioned and challenged in the light of urbanisation and climate change. Ecology and environment are driving design as never before.
I am about to start working on a collaborative project in Saudi Arabia. It will involve the specification of many trees, shrubs and groundcovers and I get to find out just how many locally-sourced big specimens I can find that are of acceptable quality. Much of this will come down to the application of formative pruning in the nursery and I’ll be on the lookout for the best available in the region. I suspect I’ll be sourcing a lot from neigbouring UAE, simply because of familiarity of sources. Quality remains a challenge, though.
Excess Irrigation in a Dubai housing area
My most pressing concern I have is how to improve on irrigation techniques, which are traditionally massed surface drip lines onto marginally improved sand. This is inefficient and wasteful and I shall be looking at the use of moisture retention mediums and sub-surface irrigation. I believe most watering of landscapes in arid climates could be cut by half, just by more efficient application and retention, in the right place. The picture above shows typical wastage in a Dubai suburban landscape.
Whilst urban planting requires urban plants, I will also be looking at the use of more climate-adaptive species, which I think is important in an era of climate crisis; the Middle-East is going to struggle to cope with every degree of temperature increase. The use of more desert-adapted planting is not new, and not applicable everywhere but I believe there is much scope for experimentation and new thinking.
The power and the beauty
For me, planting design is about building communities, layering types of plants together in harmonious associations that fit. I don’t mind grouping plants together that come from different geographical regions, but they have to come from a similar ecological niche. Such design is so much more than just nice foliage contrasts and I believe the results can be subtle, but profound.
Landscape must, of course, fit our purpose but I believe we tend to pursue this end to the exclusion of everything else. Nature is the basis of landscape, and so too is ecology, ecosystem and planet. We should not divorce our landscapes from this reality; rather, they should always seek to remind us of these connections. So yes, in town centres and urban streets, we have our eco-bling landscapes; vibrant places, exotic, heady, purfumed, exciting. Nature at it’s most unbelievably flamboyant (cue pic: delonix, the flamboyant tree). Elsewhere, we need more grounded landscapes, more real, more connected to place.
Delonix regia, the flamboyant tree
I love this tree, it is everything I have described above, pure eco-bling. Yet it is not appropriate everywhere and because it has become a part of the standard landscape palette, I belive it is overused, and used in places where other species would be more appropriate. I think there are many trees and shrubs that could be used in the region that haven’t been tried yet, from East Africa, for example. The climate there may be more equatorial and more varied but it is not so remote or different as that of some exotics imported from sub-tropical climates (the Delonix mentioned above is from Madagascar, again not too dissimilar).
I think planting design in the Middle-East faces a whole new range of
challenges and opportunities. The changing climate will force new
thinking, to match the new development and the new understanding that is
emerging of our intimate relationship with nature. I’m hoping to
contribute towards that new expression and understanding.
The world is finally, at the last minute, waking up to the impending effects and consequences of climate change. In the scramble to work out what we must do (apart from the obvious cessation of burning fossil fuels), one thing, one factor is looming large: we need to put carbon back into the soil, where it can be stored indefinitely, and we need to reforest the Earth. Much of this is in the agricultural realm but there is a huge amount that can – and must – be done within the landscape and horticultural sectors.
Horticulture has a MISSION, it just doesn’t realise it yet
At the centre of this is good soil husbandry, something that we have largely forgotten about. Modern agriculture bypasses all need of soil health by chemically feeding crops; no need for microbes, nutrients, humus, mycelium or earthworms. Chemical fertilisers and herbicides bypass the lot. Most of our soils now are depleted to the point of useless by chemical farming, exacerbated by the tradition of ploughing, which causes erosion from rain and enables much of the soil carbon to move back into the atmosphere.
So whilst we need current global models of food production to transform into regenerative agriculture and agroforestry, we also need to look at our urban landscapes and gardens, and create a new design ethic, a new paradigm, even. I can’t deal here with agriculture but I have been thinking long and hard on what the landscape and horticulture trades need to do; fortunately, I believe there is a lot that we can do.
We need to envelope our existing horticulture trade within ecology, to create an “environmental horticulture” You could also call it ecological, resilience or regenerative horticulture. We (those of us in the trade) know that as a profession, the training of both horticulture (growing) and landscape (doing) are in decline. Horticultural colleges have shrinking budgets and often get the less ambitious or capable students; after all, who is inspired by the prospect of strimming verges or hedge-trimming another unloved carparking lot? Yet last year’s report by the Ornamental Horticulture Roundtable Group valued horticulture at £24.2 billion in GDP in 2017. That’s not inconsequential, yet it goes unrecognised. Fortunately, there is a way to make it much more enticing to prospective students.
Horticulture has a MISSION, it just doesn’t realise it yet. That mission is to adapt our urban landscapes and gardens to cope with climate change, to mitigate temperatures, water flows, to grow biomass and regenerate soils back to health. Healthy soil is the foundation of life, of all life, including our own. Good soil holds fertility, water and carbon. Yet who amongst us now knows much of soil science? Who designs landscapes as ecologies, as “novel ecosystems”, who chooses plants because they have these abilities, not just for pretty flowers? Who designs plantings for their biomass harvest, for creating mulches to feed the soil?
In this respect, I don’t believe it’s necessary – or right, in fact – to work with native plants only. What is native? What was native? What was here 11,700 years ago when the last glacial period ended and the glaciers retreated? Flora and fauna move around the globe all the time, they are opportunistic, not fixed permanently into some tightly integrated ecosystem. We know there is no “ecological climax”, no ultimate ecosystem for any given place. As temperatures rise, climate zones are now shifting away from the equator quicker than Nature can keep up, although it’ll get there eventually. Maybe we help nature, rather than interfere when we bring in exotic plants that naturalise. Maybe those plants are the start of new ecologies that will adapt to the rapid changes that this climate emergency is bringing us. If plants do well, we need to understand how to enhance and build new ecologies with them. This is how we adapt, how we survive and how we rectify the damage we have done as a species; not by returning to some pristine “before” (which doesn’t exist) but by assisting Nature to heal and adapt. The Earth will do this all by itself, and has done so many times. It doesn’t mind if it takes thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years to adapt. But we do; we can’t wait that long.
Vertical urban greening – Edgware Road living wall designed by the Author
So horticulture needs to stop growing pansies in peat with unrecyclable plastic trays and start sorting out which plants really matter for our future; which ones contribute to new and existing ecologies, which ones are good for biomass, which ones contribute to soil health, which ones give us ecosystem services. We should not enhance one environment at the expense of another.
What’s needed is a very-near future profession of trained eco-warriors, soil saviours, tree patriots and landscape lovers. It needs people who understand soil, who know how to design and use sensors, data and the internet of things, people who see what’s coming and how to mitigate and reverse negative effects, people who really know how to design and install green infrastructure and future automated robotic maintenance systems. Our landscapes can grow food in amongst all the beauty, with urban food forests. We need new knowledge built on old and we need passion, commitment. A wise government would fund this for the returns will be numerous.
This is the enlightenment, that out of dire stress and trouble, we could really learn how to value, connect with and protect this crazy, beautiful world within which we live. Or we can do nothing and watch it all go to hell. I know which I’ll be doing.
The safety of children and water is potentially a controversial issue and I want to make it clear from the start that these are genuine thoughts, with genuine intent but please don’t try and hold me liable for any disasters or accidents that may befall you or your loved ones. I cannot be responsible for your life and any decisions you make on this issue are yours alone. I naturally hope and intend that only good and positive benefit can come from this writing.
Children have an almost universal fascination with water, and parents
an equally almost universal fear of it, or of their children being near
it. We have all heard the horror stories of children drowning in a
pond, or even a shallow puddle and our hearts go out to those
unfortunate few who have suffered such a fate.
Children enjoying the water
But we seem to live in a fear-driven compensation culture, which
stifles creativity or adventure because of the risk of hurt. Authorities
and companies cannot afford to take risks, or allow other to take them.
Consequentially, more
and more things get banned in the interests of public safety. The
world may be safer as a result but it is certainly blander.
As a young child I would walk the suburban mile or so to school on my own, ride my bike to visit friends, play down at the dump, swim in the sea and generally have freedoms many children are not now able to experience. But creative play is an essential part of a child’s development and must be catered for somehow. A love and respect of water should be encouraged and this requires contact and familiarity with it. I believe that those most at risk are those who do not appreciate the dangers and those who are too young to.
Out of the disaster of the Iraq war, this burst water main provides a moment of joy for children and adults alike.
It is true, of course, that much of this familiarity, or lack of, will be caused by the geography of your environment. If you don’t have water in daily proximity, it is hard to become familiar with it. If you don’t see with your own eyes how a little stream can become a raging torrent after a downpour, then you will not be aware of the potential danger. Knowing the dangers brings about respect, gives us boundaries beyond which we know that things aren’t safe. In urban areas, the increasing use of WSUDs (water sensitive urban design) in the form of swales and rain gardens is a positive development.
There’s another good reason for us to have regular contact with water and that is a biophilic one. Water is a vital element, which, through modern living, we now tend to regard as no more than a right of utility. But water is the life force of the planet, and so of ourselves. Why else would we want it in our gardens? It soothes us, distracts us from our cares, puts us in touch with those deeper fundamentals of life, if we but let it. Children who experience this often can only be better off for it.
Children playing in a rain garden in their family home. When dry, this is empty.
So if I’ve convinced you that it’s good for children to experience water, let’s think about how we might do so with some safety. First of all, young children should be supervised by an adult or responsible elder child, that goes without saying. I don’t advocate that you leave them alone. I don’t know if there are any statistics available as to the ages of children that have accidents with water, but parental sense will tell us all that children under five have little comprehension of danger and must be watched very carefully, as must those of all ages with special needs. Water features should perhaps be fenced off while children are in their early years.
If there’s not much you can do about water in your wider environment, then you can perhaps create a feature in your own garden.
This drawing of a stream cross-section could also be for a small pond. Pebbles and shingle make a good base, which the children can play with. Shallow water with gentle slopes mean that if they fall over, they can stand up and climb out.
Steep sides are the most dangerous aspect of a water feature, preventing children (and animals) from being able to stand up or climb out.
Loose paving on the edges of ponds is another risk factor; use only large slabs or stones and make sure that they have only a small percentage of overhang, and are securely cemented in place. Better yet, use a pond-edge design style which doesn’t use paving in this manner at all.
A reminder of what it’s all about – fun! Don’t do this on paving which may become slippery and prevent algal build-up.
With gently sloping sides, layers of subsoil, gravel or shingle will protect the pond liner and give good grip for feet and hands – bare liner tends to be slippery and is more vulnerable to damage. Good construction helps all round, although that is not the subject of this article. If you have an overhanging deck, make sure the water is not too deep at this point and that children can’t get trapped underneath it. Metal or plastic grids can also be built into a pond, sitting just below the water level. These need careful thought as to their siting as they must take the weight of a person without breaking. The danger is these can look very industrial.
As a final thought, if you want moving water but don’t want the depth of a pond, consider a stream garden, where water just flows along a shallow water-course. There is no pond as such and the water just disappears underground into a hidden sump tank, which houses the pump and which is inaccessible..
This stream feature is used by children – the water barely laps their ankles. Stones are moved, small dams made…
In conclusion, there are many things that children learn from playing with water: self confidence, balance, awareness of danger, responsibility, experience of wildlife and of Nature’s rhythms. A careful and reasoned approach is what is required for allow a child safe, creative exploration.
And of course, we adults are all children at heart, too. Play safe.
The emergence of the idea of resilient planting is a response to a number of different pressures which all have one underlying cause – climate change. Whatever the cause – and I’ll get on to that later – I see it as the most exciting change to the way we design our gardens and landscapes.
Last year we had one of the hottest summers ever recorded and it serves to heighten awareness of the vulnerability of some plants and garden styles to the increasingly erratic climate we are dealing with in the UK. We seem to swing from one extreme to the other, and this is only likely to get worse. I’ve witnessed a number of stressed plants in my own garden but feel relieved that most have thrived throughout the heat, without any watering on my part. this is down to soil, drainage, micro-climate and above all, plant choice.
Ballota pseudodictamnus, a Mediterranean sub-shrub with grey, felted leaves, loved by bees.
We garden on an alluvial coastal plain, and are fortunate to have a very free-draining soil overlying a clay substrate. It gives us fertile soil, great drainage and a moist sub-strata within the reach of most plants (many areas around us are of much heavier clay). A large section of our front area used to be a paddock with a rubble driveway and this now forms the basis of much of my dry garden. Some rubble was removed and topsoil added, but a lot of areas are still rubble-strewn, not unlike some rocky soils. The down side of all this is super-fertility and a soil filled with weed seeds, bindweed and couch. To be honest, I’d have preferred a poorer soil.
When thinking of resilient planting, we have to match our plant type to the environment; we also have to think, long-term, of how our environment might change in the coming years. This is not so important when dealing with short-lived plants such as herbs, sub-shrubs and perennials, but is super important when dealing with long-term structures, especially trees. This is doubly true when we look at the potentially disastrous effects of imported pests and diseases that we are having to content with. Climate change, especially milder winters, mean that exotic pests are happily making a home here and wreaking an unintentional devastation to trees such as our native ash and even oak.
Phlomis russeliana, after flowering. The stem leaves have since dropped, leaving a brown, architectural structure.
No-one can say exactly which way our climate will go as the world hots up; we know we (in the UK) will always be maritime, because that can’t change, but as the Jet stream (wind currents) varies and the Gulf stream (water currents) weakens, we don’t really know what kind of climate we’ll end up with. We can only plan for extremes, and select our planting choices with that in mind. In this respect, the “new perennial” or “naturalistic” planting isn’t necessarily going to be the toughest choice as they come from a continental climate which generally have hot summers and very cold winters. Prairie plants tend to get out-competed here with our mild winters and grasses and forbs that can grow all year round, given mild conditions. The aforementioned fertility (at least in my garden’s case) also doesn’t help as wildflower meadows/prairies tend to have poor soil which helps keep the grasses from assuming dominance. During the heat-stressed weeks, I noticed that where I have perennials like Echinacea and Veronicastrum (in moister areas than the dry garden), they suffered from the lack of water. which resulted in the Veronacastrum flower spikes looking stunted. for more moisture-demanding planting, sub-surface irrigation using harvested rainwater might become a necessity.
To my mind though, if you need irrigation you’re working with the wrong plant-types, trying to grow plants that can’t naturally cope with the conditions that predominate. Save your water for the newly planted and the vegetable plot and for this, consider rainwater harvesting, rather than mains. When selecting plants, see what grows well, both of native and non-native origins and build adaptive micro-ecologies. Our climate is changing faster than the current ecosystems and ecologies can cope with and we need to do whatever we can to build new planting that is of maximum benefit to local wildlife, as well as ourselves.
It’s an exciting time to be a gardener, for there is no place now for the self-indulgence and nature-control-freakishness of the past. What there is a the possibility of co-creating new ecologies that adapt to changes, halt decline and make our local wildlife vibrant and healthy.
Along the way, we can create the most stunning of gardens!
NOTE: This article was first written in 2006, so some aspects have been updated to reflect current realities.
Hundertwasser House, Vienna
Biomembranes is a term I’m borrowing from biology (the structure bounding a cell) to describe the outer skin of future self-sustaining buildings. I have stated elsewhere that I believe that for the built environment – and therefore our societies – to become sustainable, every building and community must deal with its own wastes, generate its own energy and provide nourishment – both physical and emotional – for the occupiers. Only by the creation of truly independant, carbon neutral buildings can we achieve this.
A building biomembrane
This would be a subtle and far reaching art, not easy to achieve but I believe that the rewards would be many, not to mention necessary. In this respect, the science of biomimicry will play an important part, for example, in developing paint-on polymers that photosynthesize energy, or tensioned fabric five times stronger than steel or kelvar, made with no heat or pollution, just like a spider’s thread. Whilst we haven’t perfected those products yet, let me list some of the benefits we can look to achieve in the near future:
horizontal and vertical skins of living plants that insulate, filter the air of dust and pollution, dampen noise and attract wildlife. Current living walls are used sparingly as art pieces.
composting and filtration systems that clean the building’s waste and return nutrients and water to the biomembrane and surrounding landscape.
Algal biofuel production using building wastes.
interior landscapes that provide internal cleansing and beauty.
blurring of internal/external space.
energy generation as integral with the building fabric as passive solar/pv/wind.
pedestrianised streets as wooded valleys or urban forest gardens.
SUDS drainage to filter excess water straight back to the local water table.
pedestrian/bike/electric vehicle shared surfaces removing car domination.
increase of social space by good design.
Living wall by Mark Laurence, Trondheim University, Norway
Some of these ideas are becoming well established, such as green (or living) roofs and walls, others are being played with by a few, but as yet, no one is trying to pull all these things together into a cohesive whole system. I am thinking of concepts such as combining vertical greening with greywater filtration, active cooling systems, air purification and algal biofuel from building wastes. I have recently been inspired by the work of the world-renowned architect Ken Yeang (Llewelyn Davies Yeang) based in London and Malaysia. Ken has worked extensively on the concepts of bio-climatic buildings and so his ideas are very close to my heart. Furthermore, one of his main concerns is the organisation of internal space by social structure, rather than by economic return on investment. This very much reminds me of the work of Christopher Alexander (see Pattern Language); despite apparent differences of style, the underlying philosophy is similar, Ken’s work placing it into a modern urban context.
Bio-climatic tower by Ken Yeang
There is a lot to do but the future will need autonomous
bio-buildings that take care of themselves without external input, other
than sunlight and human organisation. The main challenge is then to
retrofit these systems to existing buildings, which will always be the
large majority of available building stock.
Meanwhile, take inspiration from the work of Hundertwasser (top right) and Ken Yeang (bottom right). The application of green technology, biological water filtration and the use of every surface to create living, breathing buildings shows that humanity can and will grow up and see beyond the profit line, which so dominates and limits current thinking.
On my most recent trip to Dubai, I enjoyed walking through some of the new landscapes that emerge as projects are completed. The UAE, along with most regions of the Middle-east has a rather limited palette of plants to work with (although that is growing as new plants are tried). What struck me, however, was how poor the quality of nursery stock was in some cases and what problems are being created for later, especially with regards trees.
This is not new, nor confined to this part of the world but it bothers me that new areas of urban green are sometimes given a poor start with sub-standard nursery stock, often flown in from other parts of the world.
Simple pruning at an early stage would have improved this tree’s framework, removing crossing and rubbing branches.
Wandering around a residential area in Jumeirah, I came across some newly planted Delonix regia, one of my favourite exotic trees. At first glance it looked nice, a simple planting of trees and groundcover but on closer inspection I was somewhat dismayed at the condition of the them. The problems of poor framework were caused by their time in the nursery, not due to planting, although some of them could have been rectified by a vigilant planting crew.
This tree tie – complete with post – must have been like this from the nursery. The post did not reach the ground.
Many of the dozen or so trees had ties left on which the tree had grown around completely, making them impossible to remove. As the planting is only around two years old (by my estimation), these may have been on the trees from their time in the nursery. Possibly the planting was older and pre-dated the building they were attached to and the trees then grew around the ties after planting. Either way, it’s a strong indication of neglect or lack of care. In the picture below, all the bark ridge above the tie may indicate “included bark” – bark sandwiched against bark, preventing live tissue growth and a strong branch collar formation.
The tree tie is trapped with “included bark” at the branch collar, which indicates a potentially weak branch join.
Several problems are arising here: pre-planting care in the form of correct formative pruning (five minutes with a pair of secateurs) and Post-planting care in terms of releasing planting ties – if they were not simply left over from the nursery days. If there is no way to go back and release the ties, a bio-degradable tie should have been used.
This Ficus nigra was most likely damaged long before it was planted in this location.
Damage to the main trunk or structural framework of a tree might go unnoticed when the trees are small but cause major problems as the tree gets older and puts on size and weight. This can range from the cosmetic to the potentially dangerous in a large tree and at this stage the remedy is costly and the expertise hard to find.
As fast-growing cities like Dubai mature, the needs of landscape shift from creation (in a hurry) to maintenance (at a constant pace). Skills, awareness of the need for – and absence – of skills, will become more and more urgent. If Dubai wants to keep it’s beautiful, green mantle, then there is a whole new phase of arboricultural care awaiting to be discovered and initiated. I have carried out trees assesments and given basic training of correct pruning methods in the UAE, but that has hardly scratched the surface; there is a lot more to be done.
Trees are the urban, biophilic, blanket that clothe and surround the concrete mountains we build. Trees make hot places not just bearable, but unbelievably beautiful. Trees absorb dust, cool the air, add moisture and oxygen and enrich our Souls. We need to honour and look after them, so that they can look after us.
The way in which we design, create, maintain and use urban landscapes is likely to change radically in the next 15 years (in fact, modern society is in for overwhelming change). Urbanisation, climate change and the rapid rise of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) will see to that. Don’t think that the rate of change will be the same as has occurred in the previous 15 years, for technological growth is on an exponential growth curve, not a linear one. Cities and systems are becoming smart, connected to the Internet of Things and that is just for starters. So how will this change the way we design and use our urban landscapes?
Firstly, we know that there is huge movement of populations from rural to urban life, especially in the developing worlds and most markedly in Asia. This creates huge pressure for new urban infrastructure and this is not always well planned growth, especially in terms of forward thinking to account for future changes. Nonetheless, it is happening and happening fast. The UN expects 66% of the world’s population to be urban by 2050, by which time there will be 9bn of us – so 6bn in cities. Mega-cities have to grow in a way that sustains huge numbers of people.
Secondly, climate change is also occurring at exponential rates, raising the difficulties of living in any environment but with especial problems for mega cities, most of which are in coastal regions and subject to rising sea levels and worsening weather patterns. Cities are hotter than the surrounding land due to the nature of materials used, whilst heavy rainfall brings flash-flooding. In arid countries, built environments are in danger of becoming too hot for humans to inhabit. Cities will have to take on these challenges, generating micro-climate.
Thirdly, technological change is happening exponentially and this will impact what we do, how we live, how – if – we work and how we tackle the above problems. Some view the challenges and changes with fear, thinking they will only exacerbate problems. They could do, anything can be mismanaged (such as a planet) for example. I foresee that technology is actually the only way we are going to get ourselves out of the mess we have created, the only thing that can act on the vast scale needed to re-balance an out-of-kilter Gaia.
When we take these three factors into account, we can see that the future of urban landscapes has to be so much more than the addition of the odd pocket-park here and there. Landscapes have to mitigate the environmental factors, make huge mega-cities liveable for a population increasingly disconnected from nature and provide meaningful lives in an era when many of us may not work in the way we are used to.
Weedy and neglected landscape plantings are all too common. No-one wants to pay for maintenance
How will cities become smart and use this to better the environment? If we are looking to increase the amount of urban landscaping significantly, then the first issue to tackle is cost of maintenance. No one wants to pay for maintenance and often, no one does. How many planted landscapes do you see smothered in weeds, wrecking or negating the designed purpose? Or municipal plantings and car-parks where plants inevitably die and are never replaced, leaving huge gaps. Shrubs hedge trimmed into amorphous shapes because that’s the quickest way to “maintain” them. It’s a poor standard and it’s all we’re going to get – no-one is going to pay for trained horticulturalists to do something better.
Landscape lobotomy: maintenance is the quickest, cheapest possible
Yet there is an interesting possibility – automation is likely to remove nearly 50% of jobs in the next decade, especially low-skilled or repetitive ones. In the landscape trade, there are already semi-autonomous strimmers and grass-cutters on the market, how long before we have horticultural robots maintaining our landscapes? All the technology is already here, prices are falling and an uplink to an AI would identify every weed known, give the correct procedures, know how and when to prune every plant in common cultivation. Robots would work long hours without tea breaks! If basic maintenance getters a lot cheaper, we can have more landscape and such robots would be cheaper, eventually. Living walls would be a prime candidate, with a simple maintenance cradle (much like a 3D printer head) that crosses the wall with a maintenance bot on it. I’ve seen so many potential living wall projects fall at the maintenance-cost hurdle. In such a scenario, displaced maintenance crew can retrain as bot-supervisors or true horticulturalist for private clients.
Horticultural robots will make maintenance cheaper and more effective.
We’re going to have to do more than just make maintenance affordable; rather, that is the factor that releases the possibility to do more urban landscaping. Many of the elements we need to put in place are already in existence and being used, but we need to join the dots and think holistically. For example, green roofs are seen as a separate trade from green (I prefer living) walls. Instead, we need to be talking of biological membranes (biomembranes) for buildings, a whole-system concept, where the living skin regulates the internal environment, filters pollution in both directions, dealing with generation of energy, cooling, clean air and water. Living walls that currently use potable water for irrigation when they could be cleaning up the used greywater that all buildings generate is another example.
Building Biomembranes regulate building ecology and create vertical landscapes
Systems that provide services that are of consequence to the functioning of a building, street, or neighbourhood need careful management and control, much of which will become automated. In just the last year, for example, new irrigation controllers have come on the market which not only are connected to you via internet, they also connect to the nearest weather station and adjust their regime according to the conditions. I use these for living walls; I do not advocate any irrigation for horizontal landscapes in temperate climates. But things will move beyond this, with AI monitoring ground moisture levels and moving harvested rainwater from one holding system out to another part of the city where it is needed. And urban farming – especially vertical – will be a large part of mega-city greening, although it might not be on display. Sophisticated hydroponic systems are springing up in warehouses and roof-top polytunnels all over. Such food can and should be organic, local, healthy, nutritious.
A smartly connected landscape means we can maximize the benefit it gives to the people who live, work or pass through it. With the majority of people living in urban mega cities, we have to create an environment that is fit for ultra-dense urban living. As these metropolis’ grow, people will have less and less daily contact with Nature, which is not good for our deeper wellbeing. Biophilia is our innate need for contact with the natural world: plants, trees, flowers, insects, sunlight, water, earth. A concrete jungle is not a substitute for the real thing but we mostly won’t have time to “get out there” and experience wild Nature.
I think inner city pollution will blow over – excuse the pun- in the next 5-10 years as we start a massive switch over to electric transport, most of it driverless. In fact, drone taxis are already under development and as buildings and living habitats reach skyward we can expect the landscape to move with them. It will become commonplace to have high-level dronepads – even private ones. Some people might not even go down to the ground much! So landscapes and biophilia must come to them. Fortunately, there is a rash of building-integrated vegetation going on and I see this trend increasing. Incidentally, if you wanted more good reasons for using bots to maintain planting, imagine working on living walls or trees that are 50 stories up!
As for the wider environment and the looming crisis of climate change, I can only hope that emerging nanotechnologies give us the tools to clean up our act and neutralise the positive feedback loops we are creating. Scientists are already working on nanotechnologies which capture and convert carbon into useful materials and one day such microscopic machines may roam our land and seas, removing plastics and other dangerous waste. If this is done at a molecular level, we turn problems into resources. We’ll be printing our houses (already being tested) compounds made from waste materials but without the current worries of using say, bricks made from recycled plastic which off-gas VOCs. We can only hope these technologies emerge before it’s too late to save the climate in a state that we can survive in.
So the next 10-15 years are going to see change at an unprecedented rate and it may not all be a smooth ride. I am excited by it however and think that there is much to be done to ensure that we create new urban environments worthy of habitation and that we take care of all environments and indeed the whole planet. Smart cities are coming and at their best they could loosen our imaginations and liberate us from a monotonous life of work and stress. Let’s make that the scenario that happens…
