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Kate's avatar

Given the way our summers keep getting hotter, I do think that increasing the amount of hard landscaping is only going to add to the problem. Gravel does heat up in the sun and releases that heat slowly. Green plants, even ones that are very well adapted to a hot dry environment, will cool instead. We inherited a sunny gravelled front garden/ driveway and when you opened the front door on a hot day you were hit by a wall of heat. We’ve removed a lot of it, (re-used by a landscaper friend), and planted sun tolerant ground cover for the driveway and mid sized evergreen shrubs and perennials on the garden side. No more wall of heat in the summer, more wildlife, more insects, more colour and flowers and more comments from passers-by about how nice to see a garden!

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Sally Morgan's avatar

Well I must admit to having large areas of recycled aggregate - last April I had a digger take up half the concreted yard outside the house, put it through crushers and dropped it back in situ with around 10% 'soil' mixed in. And its being planted up with grasses, euphorbias and lots of self seeded spp like verbascum and verbena. Despite a dry May/June (no watering) it thrived and was full of pollinators all summer - will see what next year brings. It will be 'wild' and provide a link between the formal house and garden and surrounding fields of my organic farm. We had plenty of aggregate to reuse from the clearance of an old barn. It too went through the crusher and been used to make garden paths and new gravel beds - not necessarily an economic saving, but has reduced the carbon footprint of the new garden considerably.

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