Living the DRY LIFE

As more of us accept the practical good sense of embracing waterwise plants, a new question arises: how do you actually create a beautiful ‘dry garden’? Here’s a look at what the shapes, textures and spatial elements of natural dry landscapes can teach us

We’re entering a whole new world of thrilling, inspiring, creativity-catalysing dry gardening. For as long as I’ve been keen on plants and planting (scarily close to 40 years), there’s been talk about how we gardeners just have to get serious about saving water. But there’s been too much preaching, too much moralising, and nowhere near enough ‘wooing’ of garden lovers. We’ve been presented with lots of plants that don’t need much water, but very few models of how to put them together to create the heart-stopping effects that motivate us. But I’m excited to say this is changing. Rapidly. Some of the most compelling models of how we might garden in the dry, rather than just try to garden in the same way but with less-thirsty plants, come from nature itself – from natural plant communities.

Garrigue

This French term (pronounced ga’reeg) describes a vegetation type largely made up of evergreen trees and shrubs on the spare, limestone soils of the Mediterranean Basin. The plants are subject to high temperatures, drought and wind, and the soils are low in nutrition and very well drained. In response, foliage tends towards olive-greens and greys (like much of our Australian flora), and the predominantly low shrubs are often dense and domed as a consequence of slow, stunted growth or wind pruning. The relatively thin overhead canopy, where it exists, is of smallish, multi-stemmed evergreen trees. It is very similar to much of our own temperate coastal vegetation.

Appropriated as a style of gardening, garrigue can be characterised by sculptural, twisted trunks hovering over low evergreen shrubs, often clipped to maintain a crisp outline. Critical to the success of this look is the lack of congestion between the ground planting (up to 1.2m) and overhead canopy, so you see through to the twisted trunks holding the canopy, umbrella-like, above.

This model is perhaps the best fit for the distinctive work of coastal designers such as Fiona Brockhoff and Peter Shaw. Thanks to Fiona’s work of nearly 30 years, this look isn’t new to us, but its adaptation to non-coastal environments may be. Brenton Roberts’ garden in the Adelaide Hills (you may have seen it featured in the magazine as a finalist in the 2018 Gardener of the Year awards) takes this exact form. As it happens, Brenton doesn’t consider or treat his garden as a dry garden, but I’d argue that it could survive perfectly well with a lot less water than it gets, and is the perfect visual model of this kind of garrigue garden.

Steppe

The term steppe can refer to either a specific vegetation type or the climate zone and conditions associated with it – usually very hot in summer, very cold in winter, windswept, and with thin, generally poor soil. The vegetation is typically treeless and mostly grassy or shrubby, but often contains a huge diversity of flowering plants that reach peak bloom in spring and early summer before the soils dry out severely.

As a model for gardens, this provides some really fine visual prompts for open, large-scale planting, or perhaps even for a lawn substitute, as long as lawn isn’t required for recreation.

Planting of this type usually forms around a fundamental permanent matrix of visually modest plants that look good together, within which a whole lot of seasonal sparkle from bulbs and other ephemeral perennials can rise and fall with the seasons.

My own steppe garden never receives any water (in an area with average annual rainfall of approximately 700mm, hot, dry summers and frosty winters), and provides me with a virtual playground for plants that may flower only briefly, though en masse, within a structure of grasses and evergreen perennials such as Euphorbia rigida and E. ‘Copton Ash’.

Prairie

Prairie is the visual model that has driven much of the naturalistic planting movement using perennials in huge, interlocking sweeps – and of which Dutch designer Piet Oudolf is the undisputed master.

While much of the tallgrass prairie in North America that partially inspired this kind of gardening is permanently moist, there are also areas of dry prairie that are visually similar, if rather shorter (tallgrass prairie can easily be several metres high at its late-summer peak).

Experiments with this kind of planting in Australia have shown it’s achievable with minimal or no water, at least in the cooler zones of the country; and even in the warmer parts, such planting can be designed to provide a substantial reduction in water use compared with more traditional forms of gardening.

Plant selection is key, and it’s really useful to consider the climate of origin of the plants chosen. For instance, heleniums and veronicastrums, which might be considered prairie-planting staples, come from quite damp zones, while other classics such as Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) simply laugh at the dry.

Not all of the recent interesting and exciting visual models for dry gardening are emerging from nature. ‘Boats End’, the extraordinary garden created by Sarah Budarick in South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula, is on an exceptionally exposed and dry site with very limited water. Sarah didn’t want to create any greater sense of enclosure than the existing, sparsely placed trees, feeling that the openness to huge, wide skies was a part of the very DNA of the site. The ground planting is a mix of drought tolerant plants from around the world. Rarely varying much above knee to waist height, they create a truly captivating tapestry of foliage types. Many of these plants flower at some time of the year, but are largely chosen for their foliage

colour or texture, or for the outline of the plant, with flowering being incidental.

More extreme still, but along similar lines, is the garden of Kurt Wilkinson on the dry northern tip of the Adelaide Hills. Kurt is a hedge trimmer of extraordinary skill and experience, and has spent most of his professional gardening life dancing around plants grown to be forced into unnatural shapes. But in the past few years, he has discovered the joy of perennials, and the disarmingly brilliant combination of perennials with crisply clipped domes and pencil-thin Italian cypress around his own home is taking this thinking to a whole new place.

Kurt neither weeds nor deadheads, and limits himself to plants that are capable of simply scoffing at the very tough conditions he faces – plants such as velvet centaurea (Centaurea gymnocarpa), which Kurt says he plants by driving a screwdriver into his suboptimal soil (in fact, you could barely call it soil), and sticking a cutting directly into the ground.

What Kurt has achieved in his garden is exciting in its own right, but what his early experimentation with this kind of naturalism – tamed and humanised by a scattering of strongly clipped plants – opens up to all of us is a whole new universe of gardening possibilities, with little or no water at all.

In this Fiona Brockhoff design, the silvered-timber pool fence emerges from soft-looking plantings of mostly desaturated greens. The grey domes of coastal rosemary (Westringia spp.) are clipped occasionally for added definition and clarity. Coastal banksia is repeatedly used throughout this garden for its eventual open canopy and sculptural branching. In Peter Shaw’s garden in coastal Anglesea, Victoria, repeated balls of coastal rosemary cover the ground beneath the wonderfully sparse trunks and canopy of young eucalypts. The intention here is not for enormous, dominant trees, so the species have been chosen carefully. Native coastal species such as tea-tree or banksia work equally well, particularly if low branches are removed to reveal the branching structure.

The featheriness of Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ and Agastache ‘Sweet Lili’ are typical of this kind of prairie-inspired planting, which beautifully catches the low morning and evening light. The effect is seasonal, as in the wild, and very ornamental through the slow crescendo towards flowering in late summer and autumn, then the descent into winter dormancy.

In Michael McCoy’s steppe garden, low domes of Festuca glauca and Euphorbia ‘Copton Ash’ are punctuated with dwarf agapanthus, purple Verbena rigida and English lavender. The Stipa gigantea hits its full height of 1.8m in summer, but foliage remains low so nothing beneath is shaded. Clipped Italian cypress stands above head height, making you feel you’re in, rather than on, this otherwise low planting.