The Garden That Gives More Than It Takes

Instagram has been full this week of gardeners sharing advice on how to help plants survive another hot summer. Hosepipe bans, drought-tolerant planting and gardens under stress seem to be everywhere I look.

When we talk about creating a calmer life, we rarely talk about the garden, but I think we should. Our gardens can either become another long list of jobs demanding our attention, or they can become places of respite and rejuvenation.

A few years ago, Dave and I took a huge leap of faith and planted what we now call the dry garden. Before that it was wild garden, heavenly for about two months when the cow parsley came up in May and June, and was a bit of a mess the rest of the year. There was real hesitation before the diggers arrived to scrape back that top layer. I felt a pang for those two months of beauty we were about to lose. But we had built two cabins on that plot, and the land between them had a job to do. It needed to connect them, to make sense of them as a whole, and wild garden wasn’t going to do that. The dry garden was the answer. It wasn’t only because our climate was changing, though it was. It was also because I found myself asking a simple question. How could I create a garden that gives more than it takes.

That question has become one of the guiding principles not only of my garden, but of how I execute my design process in general. I’ve always been drawn to natural landscapes and gardens that work with nature rather than trying to conquer it have an integrity, a honesty, that I am always searching for in interior too. Holidays in Greece, Italy and the south of France have all made their mark on me. I loved the smell of thyme warming in the sun, the fennel swaying in the breeze, silver olive trees, dusty paths and parched hillsides. Those landscapes never felt deprived or lacking. They felt beautiful by their own merit.

The biggest leap, and the biggest expense, was seven mature olive trees. We planted them on a wild, wet, windy day in January, standing out there for hours deciding on the exact position of each one. It felt enormous at the time, choosing a spot a tree might live in for the next hundred years. They had to be staked with guy ropes for a year while they found their roots, and until then we crossed our fingers and toes that they’d survive. That’s what a leap of faith actually looks like. Not a mood board but the reality of a wet January afternoon and seven trees being tied down with rope

The changing climate was the primary driving factor to choose a dry garden over another style but also the need to a low maintenance area as we already had a lot of other garden areas to tend. I was blown away by James Basson’s extraordinary L’Occitane Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2016. It was rugged, restrained and breathtakingly beautiful. His work at Château Capitoul has that same effortless feeling, a reflection of the landscape rather then two fingers up.

Then there was Beth Chatto’s Dry Garden and her wonderfully liberating philosophy of “right plant, right place”. I’ve learned this the hard way. We lost the Salvia Amistad in the garden’s second year. A dry garden in England has two problems, not one. There’s the dryness in summer, but there’s also the wet and cold in winter, and the salvias hated that combination. I broke my own rule and planted them again anyway. We lost them again. I’ve taken my own advice and given up on Amistad now. Meanwhile buddleia has self-seeded all through the garden without any help from me. The jury’s still out on how I feel about it being there. The lamb’s ears, on the other hand, has gone completely mad and started smothering the California poppies that I love. I now know that the real work of a dry garden isn’t drought tolerance at all. It’s balance. You could, if you wanted, fill the whole space with the three or four plants that thrive without any effort, but I like the variety, even when it means a ruthless cull every spring.

We are lucky enough to live 10 minutes away from Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness. It is entirely successful for the same reasons. It doesn’t battle against one of the harshest environments imaginable. It embraces it. Somehow, through simplicity, restraint and a deep understanding of place, he created one of the most beautiful and copied garden in the UK.

The same principle runs through Piet Oudolf’s perennial planting, Dan Pearson’s work (his recent drought-tolerant garden at Sissinghurst is worth a visit). Then there is my love of the vast American prairies and the Australian bush. They’re all reminders that beauty often comes from understanding the land rather than imposing our will upon it.

Interestingly, this philosophy can be applied to all aspects of life and it’s how I always try to work when designing interiors. I often say, “Work with what you’ve got.” Stop trying to make a dark room feel like a conservatory or a cottage behave like an open-plan warehouse. Every house has its own personality, its own strengths, its own limitations. Our job isn’t to ignore them; it’s to understand them so the house can become the very best version of itself.

And the same is true of us. As we get older, maybe the goal isn’t to look twenty years younger or to become someone else entirely. Perhaps it’s simply to become the best version of who we are now. To work with ourselves instead of constantly against ourselves. That feels like a much calmer way to live, don’t you think?

But back to the garden… People often imagine that a dry garden is only beautiful in August.

Mine isn’t. I love it just as much on a misty November morning when every grass catches the dew, and I love it after a hard frost when seed heads shimmer in the winter light. I love the movement, the texture, the silhouettes and the architectural structure it brings throughout the year.

We watered it for the first six weeks, while the new plants got established. That was five years ago. We haven’t watered it once since.

I don’t want a garden that peaks for three weeks in June and then looks sad and pathetic the rest of the year. I want one that always has something to offer. One month that might be flowers, another it’s movement. Sometimes it’s scent, or it might simply be the sound of grasses rustling in the wind.

The best gardens don’t just look beautiful. They make life easier. They remove another layer of friction. They ask less of us and give more back. Really, that’s what all good design should do, whether we’re creating a room, a garden or a life. The goal isn’t to make something that’s constantly pulling you away from what you really love doing. It’s to create something that makes your life better, practically, emotionally and creatively.

If you want the practical side of all this, the plant lists, the do’s and don’ts, the before and after photos of how that patch of wild garden actually became the dry garden, that’s in this week’s Design Notes over on my Substack.