Dave Fawthrop wrote:
Adjacent to my garden and several neighbours gardens is a road/lane
which once lead to a small factory which has now been demolished and
housing is now under construction, on the site. The developer has
built another access and has planning permission to build a wall at
each end of the road/lane. I am negotiating with the developer to
buy the bit adjoining my garden. I will need change of use planning
permission, which should not be difficult. I will probably dig out
this and build a garage and space to park the caravan there.

My next door neighbour will probably not be able to buy the bit
adjoining their garden, about 20 yards by 5 yards, about 3 ft above
the garden level. So I will probably end up getting it, to give
myself an L shaped bit of land. I hope to turn this into a wildlife
garden at minimum cost, which will also stop people getting onto my
land. The lane/road is covered with a layer of second hand tarmac
from a public road which was being resurfaced. Underneath is
probably several feet of foundry slag (the pretty green glassy stuff)
and hardcore, very well drained.

The present plan is to break up the surface with a JCB or road drill,
and spread a few inches of the cheapest soil I can get over the
surface. Then plant a row of prickly species roses as a barrier to
people, and on the rest other things to harbour wildlife, trees would
be too big, bushes up to 10 ft mature height would be OK.

Has anyone any other ideas?
Or things which will survive on these terrible conditions.

Not much idea WRT shrubs and trees etc, but if you want to save money don't
bother with a JCB, get yourself down to a hire shop and get a large kango
and 110 volt transformer, it will break the tarmac up into handy sized
chunks for removal, and another tip is to do it before summer really sets in
or the tarmac will soften, better to do it while cold and it's more brittle.

I've used these to break up a similar sized patch of 6 inch concrete which
is a lot harder than tarmac [1]...another question is what are you going to
do with the chunks of tarmac afterwards? - if it's the soft, gravelly type,
you could put soil over the top, if it's thick, compacted (motorway type)
stuff, then I think it would be better to get a skip and get shut of it.

[1] It took me a (long) day, I'd have had two easy days but I had other
things to do, tarmac should take no longer than 6 - 7 hours to break up
using a kango meaning one day's hire of equipment.