Rethinking the Garden Shed: Exciting Ideas for Eco-Friendly Garden Buildings
28.06.2023 - 11:48
/ treehugger.com
A garden shed can be far more than just a dingy, damp place where a few garden tools and plant pots are stored.
Garden sheds and other eco-friendly garden buildings can push the envelope of sustainable design. And they can show just how much can be achieved when architecture and garden design come together with interesting, practical, and beautiful solutions for our gardens.
When we place larger or multiple garden sheds in our gardens, we are losing space that could otherwise be used to grow plants, maximizing photosynthesis and sequestering carbon.
But when we integrate green roofs into our designs, we can have the best of both worlds, adding to our covered amenity space without reducing our plantable areas.
There are a number of different green roof solutions that are suited to different types of roofs, different positions, and different areas or climate zones. If you are thinking about creating a garden shed or other garden building with a green roof where you live, then it is important to understand the site and to choose accordingly.
Selecting native species rather than a generic «green roof» mix is generally a good idea since local plants are likely to be ideally suited to the local growing conditions.
I recently worked on a garden design for a client, which included a green roof of drought-tolerant native wildflowers on a bike shed and bin-storage area. Set in a front garden largely sown with perennial meadow plants, it demonstrated how man-made structures don't have to stand out like a sore thumb from the environment they sit in.
Sometimes, it might be possible to go one stage further, and rather than simply placing a green roof on a garden shed or other garden building, we might design buildings that form