Regardless of where you live and your local weather patterns, your gardens and landscape will have their own specific microclimate which is created due to several different factors and influences working together. The factors include the direction your property faces, the amount of wind, slope, and how much sun or shade it gets every day. Considering microclimates into your landscape design could prove to be one of the most important elements to how successful your landscape or garden is.
Any structures, obstacles, or barriers that you place on your lot can have some effect on its microclimate. All your landscaping plans could easily be effected by just one placement. Houses can create windbreaks that alter the flow of air above and around them. Some areas will be cooler and some areas will be warmer on either side of the house. There will also be shade in different places at different times of the day. Walls and fences both have an effect on a property just the same as natural elements like trees and hedges.
The composition of the soil surface can have effect on local temeratures and temperature changes. Some surfaces, like bitumen, attract so much heat that you can’t walk on them in the heat of the summer. And the heat they produce is even felt in the air above. On the other hand, concrete surfaces keep fairly cool. All landscaping projects will be effected differently by different elements. Turf grass is always cool. However, the temperature of the soil under the grass is influenced by how long the grass is growing over it. Temperature changes like this can help you grow warmth loving plants like semi tropical and some tropical varieties. Exposed surfaces that get hot in the daytime will transfer the heat energy back out through the night. This effect can be used to mitigate frost damage in susceptible areas.
To reduce wind exposure in any landscaping or garden, some type of barrier is usually necessary. It’s been noticed how wind barriers such as solid wood fencing makes areas of turbulence on both sides of the fence. This is common knowledge to most landscaping contractors. The best kind of barriers are those that are only half solid. A barrier like this will act more as a filter. You can use lightly-foliaged trees, an open boarded fence or a brick fence with spaces between the bricks to provide an effective wind barrier.
Water can have many different effects on a microclimate. Depending on the size of the pond, it helps keep the air temperature stable. Since ponds reflect light, it generally means that any plants that are directly around a pond get more light as well as water than those planted in other areas of the landscaping. Even though a pond will have a cooling effect on a surrounding garden and landscape in the heat of Summer, it can also have an extreme cold effect in Winter. Keep this in mind when you’re considering where to put a pond in your landscaping or garden.
Both people and vegetation get more out of it when you consider your site’s microclimate and plan accordingly.
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