GreenMade™ by locals for locals.
Spaces of Green have launched GreenMade™ Pavers – crafted from recycled materials.
I got into that habit of just turning up at my local landscape supply yard to place an order or pick up a load of something. They always have what I need right? They won’t run out of mulch or stone or soil? Until they did.
Covid saw our nation take up gardening. Little landscape businesses suddenly got very busy as garden owners retreated to their gardens to get their hands dirty.
Local garden supply yards went into overdrive trying to keep up but supply would not always allow; sometimes you can’t get what you want when you want it. Covid was good like that.
As a business we were in this tangle between supply and demand, a tangle we are still working through today and of course we are not alone. Inflation, high fuel cost and the push and pull of wages and the cost of living are continuous roadblocks that we all must navigate.
For me it took a global pandemic to stop and ask: “Where does this paver come from?” I was on my knees bent over laying one at the time, not really out of the norm for me at that moment in my life; I would have laid a hundred-odd by that point of my career.
The answer was China, and I was laying bluestone. Here I was covered in dirt and sweat tapping down on this bluestone paver whilst listening to the radio - our world in chaos, lockdowns and toilet paper rage. Oh, the irony, even the humble gardening industry was at the mercy of globalisation. My next question “Why not Australia?”. This would send me down a rabbit hole with a beautiful landing in the world of sustainability.
I sparked up a conversation with my local landscape supply yard - The Yard in Doonan. Sarah (the owner) is a diamond in the region’s landscape and horticulture scene, owning both The Yard and Doonan Valley Garden Nursery. Her business plays a huge part in the local supply chain of landscaping goods.
“90% of our products are produced within 100kms of our location. It’s all about the cost of freight, if product becomes too expensive it’s not worth having, so we are very reliant on regional supply”.
It’s an impressive figure 90%, but what about that 10%? Where did that go? Natural stone products such as pavers, tiles, stone cladding and bagged pebbles get imported from China and India as well as Turkey and Iran.
As it turns out Australia is not very good at processing natural stone products en mass. This big old land that has plenty of stone with opportunities for quarrying is however at the beck and call of the high cost of doing business in this country. Big effort with little reward leads to large companies taking their business to countries with cheaper labour. But, you can’t hold that against a business trying to make a buck.
After processing this information, I was left in a position of complexity. Yep ok I get it, sometimes the numbers don’t add up so we seek an alternative route, but doesn’t it seem a little weird to associate this as natural stone, especially when there is little to no connection to its native land?
Importing hardscape products into Australian gardens in mass scale appears to be counterproductive.
I found myself staring down at this bloody paver pondering the thought of how many hands went into this paving stone to be laid in this final location, how many sore backs, stubbed toes and jammed fingers. How many trucks and ships were used? What were the workplaces standards like? Safety? Wages? How long will it stay here for? And then where after that? I suspect this is not a carbon neutral event.
The paver indeed has a story to tell, its long journey from being part of a large rock in China to transitioning to a boutique stepping tread in a Sunshine Coast garden.
Oh, the places we will go and our ability to replicate nature has seen many amounts of amazing and beautiful landscapes all over the world, from breath-taking French Provincial to the intensity of the desertscapes of Arizona. As designers we have proven to our peers and the rest of humankind that we can create gardens to a boundless scale in environments that often care less for life.
Manipulation in all its glory of our outdoor spaces is truly credited to understanding the land around us and how we can use it to help better our human experience.
This is where the uncomfortable feeling came from, given the scale of what we are calling ‘natural stone’.
I’ve come to the realisation — for us to move forward with designing spaces in a progressive way, we need to redesign our association to the term ‘natural’ and that old statement ‘locally made’ makes good sense.
So, I asked myself…
Can the simplicity of the material be enough to complete a design?
Could the story of connection and time that came before us become the new contemporary landscape design?
When does Sustainability become the first point to consider within the garden design process?
Giving a little bit more thought to this I end up back at the conversation I had with Sarah from The Yard …. freight not being sustainable, yet importation is.
It seems obvious that the scale is off balance here, where the last 100 kms is the most expensive, given the sheer distance these products have come from but nevertheless a clear demonstration to where the dollar ends.
My conclusion draws towards choice in enabling customers, like me and everyday garden owners who are choosing the materials to use within their garden greater awareness of where products come from and how they were created for our convenience.
Importing from within your region, creating with less resource depletion, could indeed be a greater garden story than its international competitor.
We’ve channelled all this thought and heart into making our first sustainable garden product for our local community. We want to be part of the solution, and so excited to offer our new GreenMade™ Pavers to our Sunshine Coast clients.
