Last week I spent a few days in and around Adelaide. There were some gardens there that I needed to see. I’d been aware of Kurt Wilkinson’s garden, Brenton Robert’s garden and Sarah Budarick’s garden, Boat’s End, for a few years, and felt like there was stuff going on that I had to get a grip on. It seemed that each were addressing their super-tough conditions in new ways. I’d seen plenty of gardens that were working hard to not look dry – to simply replace water-demanding plants with drought tolerant alternatives, but hoping to achieve a degree of verdancy that masked the dry. I’d gardened like that myself. What piqued my interest in these gardens was that they seemed to be embracing the dry, and adopting a lean, thin aesthetic as inherent.
I discovered that Brenton’s isn’t really a dry garden, and he doesn’t pretend that it is. Even his surroundings are quite verdant. But the plant palette is mostly very drought tolerant, and the look comes remarkably close to the kind of garrigue gardens explored in the last couple of Olivier Fillipi books, with broad-scale planting of tough evergreens in simple repetition, hovered over by small to medium-sized deciduous trees. It’s a model, or an aesthetic, that could be adopted for drier conditions that his.
Kurt’s and Sarah’s gardens were, on the other hand, tough as.
I’m still absorbing what I saw. I have the kind of brain that can’t settle until it has distilled what it is seeing into principles, and these are what I’ve come up with so far. I’d really welcome your responses – getting a grip on these guidelines and principles needs to be a group activity!
1. Establish Pattern. I suspect that pattern is powerful in all planting, but it seems particularly so in dry, lean planting. Or maybe it’s just that, as long as there’s a legible pattern, we can cover a lot of seasonal sins, which may (or may not) be more evident in super-dry settings. Repetition of a strong visual element, whether that’s a plant of emphatic natural form (aeonium, artichoke etc) or a plant clipped into a shape, is the easiest way to achieve this kind of pattern, though forms of paving, or constructed elements, may also perform this function.
2. Eliminate the visibility of bare soil. At its most ‘finished’, this may involve using inorganic mulch, like gravel. At its least finished, it might be that weeds, dead or alive, do the job. But if it’s a mulch, it should spread over beds and paths as well. At no time should there be a change of materials between the bed and path – the flow between the two should be seamless. This has the secondary but important effect of allowing planting to be thin and sparse in some areas. To be able to diffuse the density of planting is essential, and to achieve this convincingly, it’s important that it doesn’t expose bare soil.
3. Plant repetitively. Planting may be diverse, like in Beth Chatto’s gravel garden, or crazily minimal, like in Kurt’s, or somewhere in between, like my steppe garden, but in all cases, it is most effective when the garden reads very simply upon taking a distant or wide view. Complexity should only be revealed on closer inspection. This is most easily achieved by giving over the larger proportion of the planted space to the repetitive use of a limited plant palette, and, when simplicity is achieved, tickling other species into the simple matrix. This, of course, is related to number 1 above. But while pattern is more likely to depend on plants of strong form, simple repetition should apply to the bulk of the contents of the garden, whether strong or subtle.
4. Embrace the browns. ‘Browns’ start to creep into most naturalistic planting in late summer or early autumn, wherever you are in the world. But they invade far, far earlier in brutally summer-dry climates. In both Kurt and Sarah’s gardens they kick in in mid-spring, and remain through the summer and autumn. This is celebrated, to great effect.
5. Consider the natural verdancy. We’re used to the idea of an oasis in the desert, but the opposite – dry planting in a verdant setting – always seems bizarre. It’s precisely what’s wrong with most cactus and succulent collections within botanic gardens around the world. They always feel like a totally inappropriate imposition (and they always make the mistake of being far too diverse (see number 3 above)). This ‘rule’ can be stretched a little when you’re either unaware of the natural conditions due to the built-up nature of urban environments, or when it’s possible to obscure the view of surrounding vegetation. But beware. There’s only a very little wriggle room.
Title picture is of detail in Kurt Wilkinson’s garden. Check out all these gardens on insta @boatsend_garden, @kurt.wilkinson, @brentonrobertsgardendesigns
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