Home & Garden
Gorgeous Gravel Gardens Making the perfect gravel garden is just a stone's throw away. Explore wonderful ways to enhance your outdoor space with a gravel garden. Landscape Designer, Sarah Murch explains how.
H
ow good it feels to be turning a corner on a long, wet winter and peering into Spring. The sap is rising, soil warming, days are stretching out and like many gardeners, I’m itching to get out in my garden, full of renewed vigour, developing new areas for our family, visitors and menagerie of animals to enjoy.
ideal for growing those Mediterranean plants that dislike sitting in cold, waterlogged soils during our wet winters. But don’t for a minute think of gravel gardens as a sparse looking rocky scree! They are lush, vibrant, spaces where you can immerse yourself in colourful plants self-seeding, repeat flowering and enjoying life to the full.
For like many people today, we are working and spending more time at home and I realise how important our gardens have become as multifunctioning living spaces. Always a welcome extension to our homes, gardens today are a place for friends and families to socialise safely, for escapism and relaxation.
The allure of a gravel garden is its clean, non-slippery, functional surface. Just like a patio, you can use it for dining, for benches, extra loungers, for the BBQ at weekends, even for hot tubs and hammocks. And it is low cost too. A bulk bag of our local 10mm Trent pea gravel will set you back around £50.00. It will probably take you an hour or so to spread and will cover 16m2. Just compare that to the price of paving and you begin to see the value of a gravel garden. It’s like rolling out a new carpet. The effect is instant.
Yet it can be challenging sharing your precious garden with a multigenerational family. The trick is to create functional spaces that work for all ages. So over the next few months I will explore easy and low cost ways you can turn your gardens into a user friendly space that is low maintenance yet full of colour, fragrance and wildlife, without the need for heavy machinery or professionals. Projects that are perfect for garden DIYers and novice gardener’s alike.
First up is how to make a Gravel Garden. Gravel gardens are versatile gardens with a surface mulch of aggregates. This 40mm thick gravel layer is clean and free draining,
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But the real advantage of a gravel garden for me is the planting opportunities it opens up. Our gravel garden is around 100m2. It wraps sinuously around a patio, a buffer between soft lawn and hard paving. We’ve laid stepping stones through the main routes, edged with a creeping thymes, a tapestry of mauves covered in bumblebees in spring. Lavenders, sage, rosemary, santolinas and artemesias form an aromatic shrub layer, handy for snipping and throwing on the BBQ. We have small specimen trees and tall pencil junipers for height and
