Discover dry gardens with Meredith Kirton
October 21, 2011
Spring may be one of our wettest seasons, but it also means summer is just around the corner, and with it parched garden beds. The dry Australian climate has inspired a range of gardening techniques to make the most of our landscape, and we asked garden expert Meredith Kirton to also share some of her favourite gardens for dry climates to inspire us for the hot months ahead.
Some countries do dry climate gardening particularly well, and Australians could certainly take a leaf out of their books (and gardens!) to improve our own. Spain is one such country, where great inland cities such as Granada, Seville and Madrid have some of the most beautiful gardens in the world. None more so than The Alhambra, the garden that surrounds the Sultans Palace from Moorish days on the hills overlooking Granada.
This garden boasts some superb water features, such as the Court of Lions and the Court of the Main Canal, with its hundreds of crossing water jets spurting into a long thin pond. Here, water is played up as the major feature of the garden, but the plants themselves are very lean on their water requirements, with grass replaced by paving and gravel and lavender, rosemary, roses, oleander and bougainvillea providing much of the colour.
Of course it was Beth Chatto of Essex in the UK who pioneered gravel gardening in the modern realm. She inherited a gravel parking lot in the 1990s and, rather than remove it, decided to try growing a garden in it using plants that needed little water and low nutrient supply. The world was transfixed by its beauty, and this no doubt led to the start of the xerophytic landscape movement, which took hold in the dry states of America like Colorado, Arizona and California, and then finally moved on to Australia, which was particularly suited to our climate, especially during the recent droughts.
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I live in Central Victoria and have easy access to a very good dry garden at Lambley Nursery in Ascot. There’s online info about it at:
http://www.lambley.com.au/gallery/the_dry_garden
but if anyone lives in travelling distance I’d recommend an in person visit. I’ve been known to drop in on 40+ degree heatwave days to see how various plants were holding up- and they do so very nicely.
Lambley’s water the dry garden no more than 4 times a year. Plants get watered when they are put in with a follow up watering if needed. They deep ripped the soil before making the garden and added compost, plus fresh compost is added with new plantings. A hedge protects the garden from drying winds. Apart from normal maintenance like weeding and pruning the garden gets along on its own with whatever rainfall happens- and in drought years that has been as low as 300-400mm per annum. The garden is very lush and colourful.
I’ve planted some of their varieties in my garden along with related plants and they do well on little or no water provided the soil is reasonable. (Dry dust is asking a bit much of anything short of desert plants.) Otherwise I use winter/spring active plants for colour (bulbs, winter annuals e.g. poppies). I use lots of mulch and consider the microclimate effects in planting the garden so most of my watering is the pots and vegetables (rainwater tank) or occasional greywater for the ornamentals. I can pick flowers from my garden most of the year, and herbs also thrive year round.
Can we see a picture some time of Beth Chatto’s gravel parking lot converted to low-water garden?
regards, Margaret