Key Takeaways
- Most front drives that look like a car park miss on three things: inadequate edging, plants that couldn’t handle the first summer, or too much paving.
- The safe way to shrink an oversized drive is to mark the new edge with movable objects, drive normally for several weeks, and move any line that gets hit.
- Plants beside a driveway need to cope with grit, salt splash, road dirt and the heat and drought that come off paving, so evergreen shrubs with tough or silvery leaves outlast bedding every time.
- A planting island in a driveway has to be dug through the drive’s foundations into natural subsoil, or the plants sit in a giant pot and die of drought or waterlogging.
- Pale-stemmed and white-flowered plants along a drive catch headlights and help a driver find the edge at night.
- Gravel laid as a decorative margin beside a drive follows the mulch depth of 7.5cm, while gravel that is driven on is laid at twice the stone size, which is a different job and a different depth.
Once I did a job on a lovely house in Corfe Mullen, with a fairly ordinary-looking front view, where the owners had paved almost the entire front garden to get two cars off the road. The parking worked perfectly well, but from the front window all you could see was paving, with barely a scrap of green left. They called me asking if there was a way to soften it without losing the parking. When I looked at it, the problem was the hard edge where the drive met the house and the lack of anything to break it up. I cut back a small section of the paving to make a planted island, leaving enough room for both cars, and used tough plants that could cope with the worst life could throw at them. I also worked a few low plants along the approach so the entrance still had some definition after dark. It made little difference to the parking, but a big difference to how the frontage felt, and I bet, the property valuation.
This Outdoor Aggregates guide covers how much of a drive you can safely give back to planting, what actually survives beside a car, how to build an island that lives, and how to use the plants themselves to light the way in after dark. The build side of driveways, the base and the drainage, is in my driveways guide, so I will not repeat it here.
What Does Landscaping a Driveway Mean?
Landscaping a driveway means designing the planting, edges and surface together so the parking reads as part of the front garden rather than a slab dropped on it. The surface is only one part of that, and usually the part that needs the least changing.
Most front drives fail on the same three things. The edge is an afterthought, so gravel wanders and paving meets lawn in a ragged line. There is no planting, or a strip of bedding that gave up in its first dry summer. And the whole thing is too big, because paving the lot felt simpler than working out where the cars go.
The first thing I did on any of these jobs was stand at the gate and look at the house as a visitor would. Two cars need roughly 3 metres of width each, which is 1.8 metres for the car and 0.6 metres either side to get out onto something firm. Most frontages have paving well beyond that, and the excess is where the garden comes back from. Function first, then material, then planting. Get the order right and the rest follows.
How to Landscape a Driveway: How Much Can You Give Back?
The way I would help clients to find out how much drive they could give back was to mock up the new edge with movable objects and get them to live with it for several weeks. If they hit anything, they moved it until comfortable. Logs, soil-filled pots or bricks stood on end all do the job, and what is left standing is a tested edge rather than a guess on paper.
I used to tell clients to give it a month, through at least a couple of wet nights, because the line you clip in the dark and the rain is the one that counts. This usually worked as I woould generally be quoting months ahead.
What comes back is usually a strip along one or both sides, a corner nobody parks in, and on a wide forecourt the space for an island. One caution: keep the sightline from the driver’s seat to the road clear, so anything within a couple of metres of the exit stays below about 60cm.
What to Plant Beside a Driveway
Plants beside a driveway need to survive grit in winter, salt splash off the road, dust off the tyres, and the drought that comes with sitting next to paving that can get very hot. Bedding plants will not do it. Tough evergreen shrubs and silver-leaved perennials do.
Rule out anything that flops. A drive edge gets clipped by wing mirrors and squashed by the passenger door, and a perennial sprawling across the paving after flowering looks bad. These are the ones I usually called upon.
| Plant | What it takes | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Lonicera pileata (box-leaved honeysuckle) | Exhaust fumes, road dirt, clipping | Low run along the whole edge, stays under knee height |
| Euonymus fortunei | Grit, shade, drought, a foot on it | Narrow strips and the gap beside a parking bay |
| Skimmia japonica | Pollution, shade, winter wet | North-facing edges and beside a wall |
| Aucuba japonica (spotted laurel) | Deep shade, fumes, dry soil | The dark corner nothing else will fill |
| Cornus alba (red-stemmed dogwood) | Wet ground, hard winter pruning | Where the drive needs colour in February |
| Alchemilla mollis (lady’s mantle) | Foot traffic at the edges, poor soil | Foaming over the edge of gravel, in a 60cm strip |
| Betula utilis var. jacquemontii (Himalayan birch) | Exposure, poor soil | Well back from the paving, for white trunks after dark |
| Rubus cockburnianus (white-stemmed bramble) | Neglect, hard cutting back | A group at a bend, for winter stems |
| Thyme | Drought, being trodden on | Between wheel tracks and along a skinny margin |
A mixed border wants at least 60cm of depth; a skinny 30cm strip is better with one evergreen run. On roots, shrubs a metre back from the edge will not lift paving. Trees will, so a tree within two or three metres of a drive is a decision worth thinking twice about.
Planting Islands and Turning Circles
A planting island in a driveway only works if the hole goes down through the drive’s foundations into natural subsoil, so the roots can get out. Cut the island out of the paving, dig out the sub-base beneath it, and keep going until you reach the soil that was there before the drive. Stop short and you have built a large container: it dries out in summer, fills like a bath in winter, and the plants die of one or the other.
I always kept islands round or oval, because a car can get round a curve and cannot get round a corner, and a simple shape is far easier to keep tidy. Edge it with something solid, a granite sett, a brick on edge or a concrete kerb, to hold the soil and to stop the odd unlucky reverse ploughing through the planting. Backfill with the soil you dug out, improved with compost, and let it settle for a few weeks before planting.
One island beats three. Every extra bed leaves awkward strips of grass or gravel to mow and rake, so one connected mass with a clean edge is the version that still looks good in year five. Keep it low enough to see over and away from wherever people reverse.
Lighting a Driveway With Planting
Pale-stemmed and white-flowered plants along the edge of a driveway catch the headlights and show a driver where the edge is, which is a job most people spend money on bollards to do. The white trunks of Betula utilis var. jacquemontii, the ghostly stems of Rubus cockburnianus and a group of Rosa ‘Nevada’ by the door all do it, and the birch and the bramble keep doing it all winter.
The one that always surprises people is how much the birches do after dark. On a long drive with a row of them, visitors stop putting a wheel on the lawn on the way in, because the trunks tell them where the edge is before the lights do.
The planting does not replace lights entirely. A dark step by the front door still wants a light, and so does the point where the drive meets the pavement. The pale plants mark the run between those two points, so you need fewer fittings and none of the runway effect of a solar spike every metre. Mark the entrance with a matched pair, two pots, two clipped shrubs or two small trees either side of the approach, and the eye finds the door on its own.
Where the Stone Meets the Planting
Gravel beside a driveway does two different jobs at two different depths, and the membrane question has two different answers depending on what sits on top of it. Mix them up and you get a thin, weedy margin, a drive that swallows tyres, or a sheet of fabric doing nothing under a pile of rotting bark.
| Job | Depth | Membrane | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gravel as a mulch over a planted strip | 7.5cm | Yes, over the soil, and it keeps stone and soil apart for years | Depth is there to block light from weed seed |
| Gravel the car drives on | Twice the stone size, so 40mm for 20mm | Yes, at the bottom of the dig under the sub-base | Deeper than twice the stone and tyres sink in |
| Bark over a planted strip | 7.5cm | No, the bark becomes the growing layer as it breaks down | Topped up yearly as it rots |
| Any loose stone at an open edge | Sits just below the top of the edging | Trapped by the edging | Loose stone needs a restraint on every open side or it ends up in the border |
The edge between stone and planting decides whether it looks finished. A kerb, a sett edge or a steel strip all work, and the edging a garden guide compares them. Where a margin gets walked on, self-binding gravel compacts firm and stays put; the self-binding gravel range shows the buff, red and Golconda versions side by side, and Outdoor Aggregates stocks the driveway gravel and decorative stone in bulk bags, delivered by pallet nationwide.
Tips For Small and Narrow Front Drives
A small front driveway gets its garden back from the edges and the entrance, because there is no width for an island. The typical new-build strip is about 2.4 metres, enough for car and driver, with the passenger stepping into whatever is alongside. That strip is the first thing to plant. Something low and tough that can take a foot on it, thyme or a low Euonymus fortunei, beats bedding that gets flattened every school run.
The second place is the entrance. A pair of pots or clipped evergreens either side of the gap does more for a narrow drive than anything in the middle of it. Keep them clear of the doors and the turn of the wheels; I have seen too many nice planters with a bumper-shaped dent.
The third trick is to stop paving where the cars stop. On a lot of narrow drives the surface runs to the house because that was easier to lay, but the last metre and a half is never driven on. Take it back to gravel margin or planting and the drive looks shorter and the house bigger. If you fancy a strip drive, two wheel tracks with a gap between, put gravel in the gap; grass there copes with occasional use and packs to mud under a daily car.
Keeping a Landscaped Driveway Low Maintenance
Low maintenance driveway landscaping comes down to four choices: evergreen shrubs instead of bedding, one connected bed instead of several, gravel mulch over the planting, and an edge you can run a mower or a rake along without stopping. Get those right and the yearly work is a trim in late winter and a rake after the leaves come down.
The mulch does most of the weeding. Gravel has the edge beside a drive because it does not blow about, rot, or need topping up yearly. Weeds that appear on a gravel margin after a few years have almost always germinated in the dust and leaf litter between the stones rather than come up from below, which is why a fresh sheet of fabric later on changes nothing. Pull them out as you go when they are easiest.
Ground cover finishes the job. Once thyme, Euonymus or a low cotoneaster has knitted together there is nowhere for a weed seed to land, and the drive edge stops needing you. The vulnerable time is the first two years while it establishes. Mulch it hard, water it through its first summer, and after that it looks after itself.
Next Steps
We supply the materials that do the quiet work in a landscaped driveway: the driveway gravel for the surface, the decorative stone for the margins and mulch and bark and mulch for the planted strips. Run your measurements through the gravel calculator to work out the bags, or get in contact and we will sort the numbers with you.
If you would rather talk your driveway through with a person, ring Outdoor Aggregates on 0330 043 7585. The office is open 7am to 7pm, seven days a week.
Have you ever taken part of a driveway back to planting? What did you plant along the edge, and how has it stood up to the cars and the winter grit? Love to hear how it went in the comments.
FAQs
How do I make my driveway look nicer?
A driveway looks nicer with a deliberate edge, some evergreen planting along at least one side, and the paving stopped where the cars stop rather than run to the house. Those three cost far less than a new surface and make more difference to how it reads from the road.
What should I plant next to a driveway?
Plants next to a driveway need to cope with grit, salt, dust and drought, so tough evergreen shrubs such as Lonicera pileata, Euonymus fortunei, Skimmia japonica and Aucuba japonica are the reliable choices. Keep anything within a couple of metres of the exit below about 60cm so you can see the road.
Can I put a planting island in the middle of my driveway?
A planting island in a driveway works as long as the excavation goes through the drive’s foundations into natural subsoil and the island is edged with something solid. Dig it out like a container and the plants will dry out in summer and drown in winter.
What is the new driveway rule in the UK?
The driveway rule for the UK most people mean is the long-standing one: paving more than 5 square metres of a front garden with an impermeable surface needs planning permission unless the water drains within your boundary. Gravel and other permeable surfaces are exempt, and most of what gets reported as a new rule each year is that one again. Check with your council before paving a frontage.
Do tree roots damage a driveway?
Tree roots can damage a driveway, and shrubs generally cannot, which is why shrubs a metre back from the edge are safe and a tree within two or three metres is a decision to make with your eyes open. Plant trees at the far end of the frontage, away from the paving.
Can you plant between the wheel tracks of a driveway?
Grass or low planting between the wheel tracks of a driveway copes with occasional use and packs to mud under a daily car, so a strip drive with gravel between the tracks is the version that lasts. Save the planted gap for a second parking space that is used at weekends.