21 September
Dear Tom Brown,
I was interested to read recently about your experimentation at West Dean Gardens near Chichester in creating a garden that is drought-tolerant and requires minimal watering. It was particularly intriguing that you said you have tried out using crushed building rubble from a local recycling centre as a mulch. You wrote that you were surprised how ‘gravel-like’ the 40mm chips were, which presumably means you don’t find them oppressively ugly, and you seem to find that they perform their twin tasks of suppressing weeds and retaining water in the soil beneath well.
You have called the garden area at West Dean the ‘dry meadow,’ although the stone mulch and lack of mowing seems to bring it perhaps closer in definition to a Mediterranean gravel garden than a meadow in the British sense. The plants you recommended, however, were not the lavender, rosemary, cistus, santolina, phlomis, cordyline, and so forth that we would typically expect to see in such a Med-inspired gravel garden either. Instead, you seem to favour North American prairie planting intermingled with South American plants – a mix of things like rudbeckia, echinacea, verbena, liatris and eryngium. I was wondering, was this a conscious choice for functional reasons or is it more of an aesthetic theme?
I was fortunate to visit RHS Hyde Hall in Essex last year, which prides itself in its dry garden. The planting there is a real mix up of drought-tolerant plants from the Med, the Americas, Africa and Australasia, which looks great and provides colour and interest in all seasons. I did note though that the RHS have taken considerable pains to modify the landscape with free-draining boulders topped with rubble and lots of sand and grit mixed into the topsoil. This is because many of the very same plants that we want to select for their drought-tolerance also hate being waterlogged, which can very much be a problem in Britain, particularly over winter. Perhaps your preference for American plants has something to do with a greater tolerance for damp compared to their Mediterranean counterparts, in addition to their drought tolerance?
I would be interested to learn of any other things you have learned through your experience over the last few years of drought-tolerant gardening. I am a keen allotmenteer and it has been quite heavy-going on the watering this summer. I have some of the plot set up in the ‘potager’ style with densely interplanted vegetables, flowers and herbs, which helps keep weeds low but still calls for a lot of water. I use garden compost and manure but have been considering trialling a non-biodegradable mulch like your recycled chips, which is something I’ve never seen used in vegetable growing. For crops like brassicas and corn, it might perhaps work well. Any suggestions you have ahead of these trials would be appreciated!
Thanks and best wishes,
Christopher Crompton
Christopher Crompton