No Irrigation, Ever
After establishment these gardens receive no water at all, including through the driest summers on record. That is not endurance, it is design: deep free-draining substrate encourages roots to travel down rather than spread near the surface, and the mineral mulch keeps the soil below it cool and stops evaporation. Owners with water restrictions, second homes standing empty in August or simply no wish to spend evenings with a hose find that the garden looks better in September than a conventional border that has been watered twice a week all season.
Poor Ground Is an Advantage
Clients often apologise for their thin, stony, builder's-rubble soil, which is precisely the condition these plants want. We remove or dilute rich topsoil rather than importing more, break compacted layers so water can escape downwards, and plant into a mineral layer. Nothing is fed, ever. The plants stay compact, flower harder, resist wind and disease, and live for decades instead of collapsing into a soft mass that needs staking. A difficult site is usually cheaper to plant than a good one.
One Cut a Year
Maintenance is a single visit in late winter: everything cut back, seedheads removed or left where they are wanted, self-sown seedlings edited, gravel raked level. There is no feeding, no mulching with compost, no staking, no deadheading and no autumn tidy. Most of our clients spend two hours a year on a garden that previously took two hours a week, and the plants respond better to the neglect than to attention. We provide the maintenance note in writing and will do the annual cut ourselves if wanted.
Flowering From March to November
Dry gardens have a reputation for looking like a car park with a few spiky things in it, which is a planting failure rather than a characteristic. Our schemes layer early bulbs, spring perennials, a long summer core of salvias, phlomis, achilleas and eryngiums, late-season grasses and sedums that carry colour into November, and evergreen structure from agaves, yuccas and shrubby herbs that hold the garden together in winter. Something is always in flower, and the seedheads through frost are half the point.
Plants Grown Hard
A third of our stock is grown on our own open beds without protection, so it arrives already adapted to wind, frost and drought rather than soft from a heated tunnel. Everything is planted small — nine-centimetre pots rather than five-litre — because small plants establish faster in dry ground, cost a fraction as much and overtake larger stock within two seasons. Clients who want instant effect are told honestly that they will get a worse garden more expensively.
Better for What Lives There
A dry garden in full flower is the loudest thing in the street on a July afternoon. Long-flowering, nectar-rich Mediterranean species support bees, hoverflies and butterflies for eight months, the open gravel gives ground-nesting solitary bees somewhere to dig, seedheads feed birds through winter, and the absence of feeding and spraying means the whole system is left alone. We record what turns up in the first three seasons at several of our schemes and share the lists with clients who are interested.
