Nearly half of the UK’s garden space is paved over, a new study has found.
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has conducted the largest ever audit of the UK’s gardens, and found that they are an untapped – and until now, mostly unmeasured – potential resource for nature.
Researchers from the RHS and AI mapping company Gentian plotted 25.8m gardens, amounting to 959,800 hectares (2.37m acres) or 4.6% of the total UK land area. They found that gardens contained an area three times bigger than all of the UK’s national nature reserves combined.
The report found 42% of domestic garden space is paved over (55% of front garden space and 36% of back garden space). Paving over large sections of garden reduces space for nature as well as exacerbating flooding as water has nowhere to go.
It also found there were 18m square metres of artificial grass across all cultivated green space. Seven and a half million square metres of this is in domestic gardens.
Gardens support more than 50m trees and thousands of species, the RHS said. They host approximately half of the UK’s butterfly, amphibian and reptile species, and more than 40% of bird and mammal species. They also store an estimated 158m tonnes of carbon.
There is an inequality in the amount of garden space available to people in regions across the UK, the report found. For example, 41% of London was categorised as garden compared with just 19% in Leeds, 25% in Edinburgh and 27% in Cardiff. It found that more than a quarter of community gardens, which provide green space for people who do not have private gardens of their own, are surviving on budgets of less than £500 a year, and less than 3% of community garden groups own their own land.
The RHS is asking homeowners to stop paving over their gardens and instead use robust planting and permeable paving to help mitigate flood risk and promote the cooling potential of gardens as well as support biodiversity. The charity is also calling on the government to guarantee “space to grow” in all housing and urban planning, so every household has access to a garden.
Clare Matterson, the director general of the RHS, said: “That there isn’t equality in access to growing space in the UK reinforces the need to shore up garden provision in the 1.5m new homes promised by government this parliament. It also demonstrates the need to ringfence space and increase support and funding for the community growing spaces that should be considered an infrastructural basic.”
Prof Alistair Griffiths, the director of science and collections at the RHS, said: “When people talk about the biodiversity crisis or nature loss they [generally] think about loss of wild plants or wildlife, they rarely think how cultivated plants and trees are also at risk and make a significant positive impact to our lives and our damaged planet. There are over 50m trees growing in UK gardens forming a vital infrastructure that cools cities, stores carbon and supports wildlife.
“We urgently need people of all ages to appreciate the UK’s gardens and garden plants not only for their beauty, but also how we can use them to help mend our fragile planet for future generations.”
