Stone is a sustainable and long-lasting garden material, so when planning changes in the garden this year why not use it. But, like everything else in gardening, choose your product carefully and take any environmental damage into account.

Natural sandstone slabs could be a much more sustainable alternative to concrete, often confusingly called ‘reconstituted stone’. We should avoid using cement whenever possible as its manufacture and transportation account for 10% of global carbon emissions. But if you ask where the sandstone is extracted, the answer will probably be India.

Children as young as 10 account for a quarter of the Indian workforce. They wield sledgehammers and jack hammers in quarries without any shoes, gloves or protective gear. They’re part of a migrant population living in shanty towns nearby.

The process causes huge environmental damage. The ground water is polluted, the landscape trashed by illegal dumping and transporting stone half way across the world incurs massive energy costs.

Local stone is much less socially and environmentally damaging than these imports but reclaimed stone is the most sustainable solution.

Several Scottish companies offer a reclamation service, collecting stone slabs, cobbles and a range of other products that are no longer needed at properties. They are then cleaned up and sold. One of these firms is West Coast Reclamation, based in Paisley. [https://www.westcoastreclamation.com/paving-slabs]

Whatever stone we use, hard surfaces do have an environmental cost. So I always try to keep slabbed areas to a minimum. A front garden smothered in concrete or paving slabs cannot let water seep naturally into the soil. Run-off from these gardens overloads the drainage system and contributes to ever-increasing flash flooding.

So I lay slabs on sand, not cement or concrete and this at least allows for some natural drainage.

Stone is versatile and can be used in several other ways in the garden. Stone-edged beds do make attractive potager-style features. I was redesigning a section of the garden in autumn 2020.

I planned to extend four parallel stone-edged beds through a broad one, 2m x 4m, which ran at 90º to them.

As I ran each bed through the lower bed I edged it with suitable sized stones collected from my nearby burn, ending up with level edges along each side. I then extended the paths between the beds so we could access the area from the lawn below. I reckon it doesn’t look too bad!

I guess I’m a bit of a stone geek. At the bottom of the garden, I replaced a gentle slope down to the burn with a low stone wall and back-filled it with surplus soil from the bed extensions. In the autumn I extended the lawn to the wall by sowing grass seed in the new area. When constructing the wall, I laid several courses of largish flat stones, very roughly 30cm x 45cm, and used soil to fill gaps. We ended up with a comfortable seat beside the burn - perfect for a cup of coffee or refreshing pint of home brew. I was highly relieved that my precious little wall withstood a raging flood angrily surging past it in the following winter.

There are so many other uses for stone, not least a traditional dyke to replace a rather dull fence or a low dyke to define an area of the garden. In time it will become colonised by mosses, ferns and enterprising plants like stonecrop that thrive with little or no water as well as sheltering shrews and beetles. I inherited some fine old dykes, but you can learn the craft by contacting one of the local dry stone walling associations in Scotland.

Plant of the week

Helleborus niger ‘Advent Star’ is a particularly early flowering hellebore though, here in Scotland, it will probably not produce its delicate white flowers until in to the new year. It is fully hardy and grows best in a moist but not soggy part of the garden.