Celebrity gardener, Charlie Dimmock, paid a flying visit to a Brentford garden in August 2006 as part of her campaign to discourage people from paving over their front gardens to provide off-street parking.
Talking on the BBC Television’s ‘The One Show’, Charlie told us that paving over front gardens for parking discourages wildlife, wastes rainwater which, instead of watering plants just runs down the drain and contributes to pollution and asthma problems. London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, added that concrete retains heat and contributes to global warming.
The garden Charlie chose to illustrate the importance of green front garden spaces was one I designed for my client Virginia in Brentford, Middlesex.
When she moved in, Virginia inherited a typically tatty concrete front garden with a few dull shrubs. She wanted more plants but still needed a space to park a car occasionally.
Virginia liked the informal Mediterranean and gravel look and the solution I came up with was to use sleepers in an informal arrangement for the car parking area, with gravel in between in which we planted low-growing sedums, thymes and rock plants.
With lavender, Perovskia, purple Berberis and golden-leaved Choisya we created a garden full of year-round colour and scent. Smooth silvery cobbles and boulders along with evergreen Phormium, Juniper, and evergreen climbers, like Trachelospermum jasminoides, help to give the garden permanent year-round interest.
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