04 Mar COUNTRY AND TOWN HOUSE – Feature
A feature for Country and Town House magazine on how to future-proof your garden.
YOUR 2037 GARDEN
Gardens are expensive to create and maintain. Especially city gardens, which often have difficult access and high contractor costs. Once completed, other than planting tweaks, a city garden will likely remain unchanged for decades.
So a garden isn’t just somewhere lovely to spend time in. It needs to be able to stand the tests of time, anticipating a host of social and environmental factors.
Your garden of today needs to be designed for the future.
For city gardens now, this is truer than ever. Technological advances, pollution and emerging trends are going to have a major impact on future design.
In this article, I’m going to look at some of these issues and opportunities and give design tips for a city garden that could be built today, and still be working beautifully for you twenty years from now.
Room to Breathe
Air pollution kills 6.5m people annually worldwide, according to The World Health Organisation. In London nearly 9,500 deaths every year are attributed to the city’s toxic air, in particular from traffic fumes. Air pollution is worse in winter, in extended dry periods and when there’s little wind. The closer your house is to heavy traffic, the greater the air pollution.
Your garden is your best defender against toxic air. Recent research into the potential cleansing effect of gardens shows that they can purify the air in and around your house by at least 50% – if designed correctly. But to date little of this research is reflected in contemporary garden design. This will surely change in future gardens.
Design tips for cleansing your air:
1. Plant smart –Trees and hedges are the most effective forms of vegetation for protecting your home, but this greatly depends on the species used and their placement. As a rough guide evergreens with needle foliage or rough/hairy leafed deciduous trees are best. Avoid very smooth-leafed plants – they’re not so good at grabbing the nasties.
Your front garden is your first line of defence, so use it wisely. Topiary in planters look elegant, but offer little protection on their own. If you have room, plant trees and hedges between your house and the road. If you are tight on space, go for green walls and climbers. In your back garden, don’t skimp on evergreen shrubs and trees, especially if you have a large lawn or patio. Creating a microclimate in your garden will add moisture to the air, reducing pollution and providing summer cooling.
2. Splashing water – Rainfall cleanses the air. So do fountains. When water splashes, it releases negative ions that trap pollutants. Fountains have the added benefit of reducing noise pollution and cooling the air in summertime. The more splashing water, the cleaner the air, but that doesn’t mean huge single jets. Consider rills with a series of lower water jets – ideally at more than one point in your garden.
Sanctuary Spaces
There are plenty of surveys claiming that people living in cities are more stressed than they were a generation ago.
Historically gardens have been seen as places of refuge from the world, respites from stress. Indeed, research into hospital gardens in California found that interaction with gardens improved patients’ recovery times and reduced pain. But in most gardens, while there are often hidden away corners, these aren’t places that feature heavily in design or budget terms.
In future gardens, thoughtfully designed ‘sanctuary spaces’ will be an essential feature. These sanctuary spaces will be beautiful, bespoke hideaways. Think of them as a bedroom in your garden. It should be a special, highly personal area where you can retreat from the world, all year round.
Design tips for your ‘sanctuary space’:
1. Semi-enclosure – In landscape terms, humans often feel most comfortable in woods, which offer semi-enclosure and protection from the elements. Similarly, your sanctuary space should be enclosed on three sides (the other side set against a boundary), but offer views out in most directions. You want to see who’s coming and feel hidden at the same time. The sanctuary space can be a solid structure or created through trees and hedging.
2. Sensory benefits – All the garden, but especially the sanctuary space, should be designed with the five senses in mind. Consider how the plants/structures will create shadows, the calming effect of scent and water and of cool colours, the energising qualities of warm colours and lighting, the touch of materials chosen, and the effects of wind through grasses.
3. Create a threshold – Reaching your sanctuary space via steps across water or another boundary device will create a sense of journey and removal from the rest of the garden and life in general.
Modern Victorians
We are at the brink of a new industrial age, where robots and artificial intelligence will transform our lives and gardens. Robotic lawn mowers and other garden tech is in its expensive infancy now, but prices will fall. Your future garden will be able to mow and irrigate itself. Plant sensors will monitor your garden’s health, indicating where and when nutrients are needed. The robotically-controlled veg patch is currently in development. It’ll do everything for you but harvest the crop. And 3-D printing will offer inexpensive, bespoke detailing.
If this all sounds radical, it’s really just history repeating itself. Look back to the industrial revolution. The Victorian period was awash with new garden technology. Greenhouses and lawnmowers, the introduction of concrete and asphalt in gardens, new transplanting techniques – the list of Victorian innovations seem endless.
Just like in the Victorian era, the dominant future garden style will be a combination of modern materials and innovation, embracing colour, craft and wonderful detailing. Enter the New Victorian style.
Design tips for the New Victorian garden:
1. Leave space for lawns – Long unloved by garden designers, the lawn (clipped to perfection by your robotic mower) is likely to return to fashion. Just avoid creating lots of stepped levels, which C3PO may struggle with.
2. Shrubs – That Victorian stalwart, shrubs, are also returning to fashion. Easy to maintain, shrubs improve air quality and help create a stable microclimate. Place small-leafed shrubs at your garden’s boundaries to extend the sense of space. Do plant them beneath trees but never too densely.
3. Go vertical – The Victorian bedding planting eyesore has already returned in a more elegant form, namely green walls. They have the benefit of giving life to walls (often the most woefully underused garden area) and can be fitted around windows to help tackle air pollution.
4. Variety is best – The Victorian were avid plant collectors, scouring the world for new specimens. Their gardens were full of variety. With so many new diseases affecting today’s trees and shrubs, it is vital to design with a broad genetic mix of plants from trusted suppliers. Pleached rows of one tree family, or uniformity of hedging is elegant but risky. Your future garden needs varied planting. A warming climate will also see more exotics featured.
5. Vibrant floors – Garden paving is often dull and monochromatic. New weather-proof porcelain tiles offer opportunities for colour and patterning. Think of it this way – before your garden had stripped floors, now it can have beautiful rugs. Just remember to keep the surrounding planting/detailing restrained or things will look busy.
Where to Start?
Of course all designs are site-specific, but it seems likely that urban gardens of the future will look markedly different from those today. Your future garden will be smarter, more horticulturally diverse, more bespoke and it will work hard for you – cleansing the air in and around your house, offering sanctuary and even food for your table. Technology will advance over 20 years, but if you arrange the space wisely and plant the right trees and shrubs in the right places, you can create your 2037 garden today.