Welcome to the website that can help gardeners to be more climate-friendly

So what is a climate-friendly gardener? Just as a wildlife-friendly gardener tries to help wildlife in their garden, so a climate-friendly gardener aims to garden in ways that reduce greenhouse gases and absorb carbon dioxide, and so help the climate remain suitable for the Earth’s existing species, including ourselves.

This website isn’t about adapting to the inevitable climate change that we’ve caused already (though we’ll need to do that too) but about doing something to help slow down climate change and stabilise our climate. Life in some form or other will go on whatever the climate. But we human beings, and the other living beings we share the world with, need a climate that suits us, the climate within which we have evolved and to which we’ve become adapted.

Most – two-thirds – of the excess greenhouse gases causing climate change in the last 150 years have come from burning fossil fuel. But a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say the way we have used and abused land is responsible for the other third.

We can be climate-friendly gardeners if we garden in ways which help to reduce rather than cause global warming.

Of course changing our relationship with the land isn’t enough to stop climate change. We need to do three other things as well:

• have only one or two children each, so that our population goes down and then stabilises at a level which fits within the Earth’s carrying capacity;
• reduce our use of energy and resources;
• and change from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy.

But what we do in our gardens can help to reverse the damage that our species has caused. We can have a healthy relationship with the land, and be part of the work to restore the Earth’s climate so it’s suitable for human civilisation and for the other living beings with whom we share the Earth.

If we want to be climate-friendly gardeners we need to think about:

• how we can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from what we do in the garden;
• how we can help our gardens to absorb carbon dioxide into the garden’s soil and plants;
• how any plants and other things we bring into the garden affect what happens outside our gardens;
• and how what we do in our gardens can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.

If you’d like to know the sources for the information and ideas on this site, the Climate-Friendly Gardener is also the originator of a Wikipedia article which is fully referenced. This website and the Wikipedia page are based on a book the Climate-Friendly Gardener started writing in June 2010. Watch this space for news of publication: the provisional title is ‘Trees and Earthworms, Soil and Sky: How to be a Climate-Friendly Gardener’.

If you’ve got any comments or suggestions about how gardeners can be more climate-friendly, or about this website, please contact us!