THIRSTY WORK
Prepare your soil and choose plants wisely, and your garden will thrive even through the driest of summers, says Monty Don
AFEW weeks ago I took a holiday to visit a garden in the Med that I have been involved in creating over the past couple of years. It was lovely – good food, good wine, swimming in the sea, excellent company and, above all, sunshine all day long. But when I got home my garden was frizzled and the sun had shone as equally hard as it had on the Mediterranean.
It is not so much the heat that affects our gardens as the lack of rain. But plants have an extraordinary ability to find moisture given the opportunity. The wise gardener creates the right circumstances and lets plants get on with it and, by and large, most plants will do just that. A few will flop and a tiny minority will die but most will adapt and recover very well.
Of all the visible manifestations of drought, a garden lawn is the most dramatic. Yellow, dusty grass replaces a verdant sward. It looks horrendous and irreversible but nothing could be further from the truth. There really is never any need to water a lawn in this country because grass recovers so well from drought and disaster. It will look bad and feel all dry and brittle underfoot just when you long for cool, green grass. But the roots remain unaffected and will sprout fresh foliage as soon as the rain comes.
However, to get the best from drought in a border you must prepare the soil well and, even more importantly, choose your plants carefully. The late, great Beth Chatto led the way in this back in the late 1970s with the publication of her book The Dry Garden as a result of the 1976 drought and followed it with the creation of her gravel garden in Essex. This was made from a former car park and never, ever watered – despite the fact that her garden has one of the lowest rainfalls in the country.
The first thing to do is to dig plenty of organic matter into the soil, or at least thickly mulch it.
This will improve moisture retention while simultaneously opening the soil out so roots can delve deeper and grow better and therefore reach moisture further from the surface. There is no need to worry if the top inch or two of the soil is bone dry if the roots are deep and can find moisture further down.
Then choose your plants wisely. The garden in the Med that I was revisiting has summer heat in the mid-40s and months without a drop of rain. But the Mediterranean hillside plants (Mediterranean in this sense covers many South African, Californian and Australian plants) such as lavender, rosemary, cistus, agapanthus, thyme, artemisia and santolina are all thriving. Shrubs like ceanothus, stachys, perovskia and box will take a high degree of drought without suffering harm. Climbers such as jasmine, eccremocarpus and campsis are also very drought tolerant.
Of the grasses, stipas are happy with sun, dry soil and very sharp drainage. Briza media and Pennisetum setaceum ‘Rubrum’ are drought tolerant, too. Euphorbia characias does well in our gardens but finds the Greek sunshine too much. Sedum spectabile, in all its manifestations, is ideal and its flowers are a magnet for butterflies and insects. Verbena bonariensis likes summer to be as hot as possible and Leonotis leonurus is only really happy in our rare blazing years. Bearded irises will flower best if they have a really good baking in mid and late summer, and most bulbs are adapted to summer heat if they get moisture in autumn and early spring.
It is so like us to complain about the weather – but most of us love the sun, really, and a surprising amount of plants do too.