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THE past year has made many people better appreciate the time they spend outside. But one kind of outdoor space has been on the decline in the UK for a few decades: front gardens.

A major factor in this downturn is the growing number of people who pave over their front gardens to create parking spaces, as well as new homes being built this way. According to a , about 28 per cent of all UK houses were entirely paved or gravelled over at the front, a .

Having more paved areas leads to flooding, as rain tends to quickly run off into street drainage systems rather than soaking into the earth, and less vegetation means less shelter for birds and less nectar for pollinating insects. All that concrete makes the place hot in summer, too.

This greying of our streets is also concerning because a great deal of research has linked time spent in green spaces with better mental health. It is often hard to disentangle cause and effect in such studies, but a recent small, randomised trial in which plants were added to previously bare front gardens did show .

From the participants’ comments, this may have been partly because they started chatting more to their neighbours as they tended their new plants, says Lauriane Suyin Chalmin-Pui at the University of Sheffield, UK, who led the research.

To be fair, not everyone has the time (or a taste) for gardening, and for some households, a paved front area may be the only way they can park next to their home. But needing space for your car doesn’t mean all the greenery has to go. You could pave just two tracks for the car’s wheels and fill the surrounding areas with tough, low-growing plants like alpines.

If you need the whole area paved, perhaps for multiple cars, wheelie bins and bike stores, one option is to grow plants in containers, although these take more watering than those in the ground. So consider leaving sections of soil at the edges of the paved area to act as planting space.

If you want a low-maintenance front garden, try hardy evergreen shrubs like Choisya, Elaeagnus and Pittosporum – or look at your neighbours’ front gardens to see what grows well in a similar spot.

If your front yard is already entirely paved, why not pull up small areas of bricks or paving stones, if you can? Gardeners in the UK seem to have started creating such planting pockets during the lockdowns of last year. A further RHS survey at the end of 2020 found that the proportion of homes with entirely paved front gardens has fallen from about 28 per cent in 2015 to 13 per cent. For some, at least, when times get tough, gardening can be a lifeline.

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