If you’re thinking about overhauling your garden design and landscaping, it can be helpful to look at other gardens for ideas and inspiration… and for those of you keen to be as sustainable and environmentally friendly as possible at home, the new Carbon Garden at Kew Gardens could give you all sorts of innovative solutions.
The aim of this new permanent garden at Kew is to highlight the essential role that carbon has to play in sustaining life on earth, as well as demonstrating the scale of the climate crisis and how plants and fungi can come together to address it most successfully.
As a material, carbon can be found in all living things, as well as in the air, rivers, oceans, soils, sedimentary rocks and fossil fuels… but the delicate natural balance has been disturbed, with human activity now releasing excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is trapping heat and causing global warming.
As alarming as this is, plants and fungi are perfectly placed to help support climate repair, capturing carbon and restoring balance.
The Carbon Garden itself features a range of different zones, including the dry garden which demonstrates how plants and people can work together to adapt to climate change. Drought-tolerant plants like lavender and Parry’s agave would be good to include at home, for example.
There’s also a rain garden, demonstrating how water flow can be managed to prevent soil erosion, reduce flooding, support moisture-tolerant plants and recharge soil moisture. Biodiversity, meanwhile, can be supported and carbon locked in through the planting of wildflower meadows, native hedgerows and grasslands.
But one of the stars of the garden is the pavilion, designed by Mizzi Studio, which appears to grow from the middle of the space as a symbolic fungal fruiting body. Created using natural materials, the pavilion is modelled on biological processes, with a forward-tilting canopy that directs rainwater into the garden, for example.
If you do visit the garden and want to replicate any of the ideas at home, get in touch with the LW Landscapes team to see how we can help.