Bright green gardens

Sustainable garden at the Painted Fish B&B

Last week I posted about how our homes will be greener in the future; today we’re going to step out into the spring weather and think about the kinds of gardens we want to become commonplace. I actually think that the big change in gardens for our bright green future will be that nearly everyone will do what only a handful of people have got set up already.

At the moment, some people have amazingly sustainable gardens. They have many or all of the following features:

• rainwater tank and/or greywater system to use water wisely
• an organic vegetable patch, some fruit trees, maybe some chickens or ducks to help reduce food miles, wasteful packaging and pesticide use
• composting to provide fertile soil and reduce waste
• native plants to reduce the amount of water we need while protecting biodiversity
• reused materials for planters, paths and other features
• solar or LED lighting to make things pretty without wasting electricity

As we already know in Australia, water is a precious resource. But that shouldn’t mean we give up having beautiful, productive gardens. We’ll have to get good at xeriscaping, and I believe we’ll see the end of suburban lawns. They’ll be replaced with native ground-covers, flowers, and shrubs, leaving room for a vegie patch and a few chickens.

Swimming pools will be more natural, instead of the chemical-laden and energy-hogging things they are now. Garden tools won’t be noisy and give off petrol-fumes – they’ll be solar-powered or use no electricity at all. People not interested in growing vegetables will get into habitat gardening (planting to attract wildlife).

As houses will be smaller, land lots will probably get smaller in some areas too. And I predict we’ll see a rise in apartment living as people choose to live in city centres to reduce their reliance on a car. Which might make you think those people will go without gardens… but there are still a lot of options for them.

Kids will always need wide green areas to play on, but this could be taken care of by the community as a whole. New housing developments and upgrades to older suburbs will include playgrounds and ovals for us all to use together, more than we have now, and better funded as well. Window boxes are an old-fashioned solution that’s getting a new, modern look. Green roofs are a wonderful idea catching on for both residential and commercial buildings in a city. And there’s always the option of community pools, co-op vegie gardens and national parks that we can share.

I predict that a bright green future will not only have us living in small, beautiful houses instead of sprawling McMansions, it will also have us becoming better neighbours as we share our outdoors life. Room to play and grow is what makes us happy, and going green can actually help us with this goal. What do you think? What vision do you have for your own garden space?

Next time: transport in the future!