Anyone with an unpaved driveway is faced with the same situation: weeds growing through the gravel. The challenge is to prevent these unwanted plants from growing. In reality, the challenge is trying to fight against a fundamental environmental law I call “The Clothes of the Earth”, which I explained in a previous article.
The purpose of this law is to protect all land surfaces. Nature therefore uses plants to cover all types of soil, rocks, shallow lakes and ponds and, of course, crushed stone surfaces.
Wherever the five vital plant parameters are present, plants will take root! If water, air, nutrients, heat and light are present, you can be sure that plants will grow sooner or later. In some environments, plants will take root more quickly. For example, rich, fertile soil will be colonized by plants more quickly than rock. The same applies to gravel in a driveway.
Most of the time, 0 – ¾ gauge crushed stone is used for a driveway. To prevent the driveway from ending up contaminated with weeds, ½” or ¾” net crushed stone should be used. However, this isn’t practical, as it doesn’t compact. As 0 – ¾ stone is made up of fine particles, moisture is retained and thus offers all the vital parameters for plants to take root.
Just as they do in the garden or in landscaping, plants use two means to establish themselves on a surface of gravel to cover the soil and thus satisfy the great immutable law “The clothes of the earth”.
The first is propagation by rhizomes and stolons.
The second is through seeds
Propagation by Rhizomes and Stolons
If your driveway is not edged at least 8″ deep, the plants that make up your lawn will gradually colonize the gravel, growing rhizomes through it and runners on the surface that will root through the driveway gravel. Over the years, the driveway will lose width, being invaded from the sides, and this is perfectly normal from an environmental point of view.
Greening Through Seeds
From spring through to autumn, nature produces seeds of all kinds that are spread by wind and animals to ensure that we have what we need to cover bare surfaces. I call this “soil protection insurance”. So, seeds constantly settle in the gravel and eventually germinate, the aim being for nature to cover this bare surface. This is also perfectly normal from an environmental point of view.
Faced with this obvious fact, we are faced with two choices:
- Attempting to prevent nature from doing its job by all kinds of means.
- Harmonize with it to simplify life and make environmental gains.
In the spirit of laidback solutions, it’s always easier to follow nature’s example. Nature shows us that an unplanted surface is not environmentally acceptable. Fighting against this evidence can only lead to more effort, product consumption, expense, GHG production and environmental contamination.
So why not simply let the driveway go green?
Or, knowing that sooner or later the driveway will be filled with plants, why not choose from the outset the type of ground cover you’d like to have in order to harmonize with the “Clothes of the Earth” law?
Many of the landscaping practices that have developed over the decades have done so solely to satisfy an aesthetic need, without considering the impact they might have on the environment. The gravel driveway is one such example, and we have to fight against nature to preserve this bare surface. A driveway exposed in this way becomes a heat island in summer. Heavy rains are not held back and run off into storm drains and ditches, carrying with them organic matter (pollen, leaf debris, seeds) as well as minerals from the crushed stone that ends up in our waterways.
Personally, I’ve given up fighting and planted a canopy of thyme and clover in one of my parking lots. When customers and visitors get out of their vehicles, the smell of thyme wafts up to their noses, and it’s the first pleasure they experience even before I greet them. I mow about 2-3 times a season to even out the vegetated surface, and that’s it. Since I like to kill two birds with one stone, I use the clippings in the garden as mulch. This parking lot isn’t cleared of snow in winter. That’s why I was able to grow this type of plant. However, if your driveway is cleared of snow all winter long, I recommend that you let Mother Nature choose the native plants that will withstand these extreme conditions, and you’ll have your long-lasting, ecological driveway.
Is it laziness to let nature take its course? Maybe for some! But I think it’s more a question of the wisdom to understand that we’ll never win a battle against nature!
One of the advantages of desert climates is that not many weeds grow without irrigation. In some desert regions of Southern California, the ‘soil’ is finely gravely, with minimal soil. So not only does not much grow in it, but it does not need to be surfaced with gravel. It is actually better than most gravel. A driveway can go anywhere it is desired, and it just works. My driveway here was crushed sandstone, which is just as it sounds, sand . . . with bits of stone mixed in. The minor weeds that grew in it stayed down because of the traffic. It sounds bad, but it worked out nicely.
We were thinking of cardboard 1st then bark, or dg. How do you feel about this kind of plan? We live in a suburb where it is just not practical to let it go to nature. Plus 2 heavy vehicles. Plus heavy rains would make it muddy no? Sorry, just thinking as I’m typing.