Naturalistic Permeable Driveways:Tips on Creating a Beautiful Place to Park Your Car
Photography by Saxon Holt, unless otherwise noted. What if your driveway were beautiful? Trained in permaculture, Hurd worked with the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners in the 1990s. By keeping rainwater on a homeowner’s property, the water soaks into the ground to recharge the groundwater table. Here’s what you need to know to create your own beautiful, permeable parking spot. Before and after—Mariposa Gardening & Design replaced this concrete driveway in Berkeley with a permeable design that created room for many new plants, including a mixture of creeping thymes and native strawberries. The first step to creating a permeable driveway is to remove non-permeable concrete or asphalt surfaces. Less driveway, more opportunities for plantings. In some designs they will add stone paths or a small patio adjacent to the parking area as well. For this driveway design, ledgestones were placed where the tires meet the ground. It’s typical to see stone blocks at the borders and apron (where the driveway meets the road) of gravel driveways to keep the smaller pebbles in place. Photograph courtesy of Mariposa Gardening & Design. A driveway paved with grass-seeded Drivable Turf® blocks. Seeded with drought-tolerant grasses or sedges, the plants can be cut short leaving the grid exposed, or if you let it grow long, the blocks will almost disappear. Photograph by Teresa Norris. Lay down grass block pavers. Plant within the driveway. This driveable meadow features ledgestones on the sides and Carex praegracilis in the middle. Plants are the final piece of the permeable paving puzzle. It’s a little counterintuitive, but they dry out seasonally in nature, so they can tolerate getting dry,” says Hurd.