How do we adapt the garden we already have?

A few days ago somebody asked me a question I've been thinking about ever since. How do you adapt an existing garden to a changing climate? Not how would you design a garden for the future if somebody handed you an empty plot and a fairly generous budget — that's a different question. Starting from scratch you can change levels, alter drainage, create different growing conditions and choose every plant with the future in mind.

Most gardeners don't have an empty plot. They have a garden — trees that have been there twenty years, borders that have slowly evolved, plants inherited from previous owners, things kept for sentimental reasons, shrubs now considerably larger than anybody imagined when they came home from the garden centre in a three-litre pot. And there's the soil underneath all of it, which isn't terribly interested in whatever gardening fashion we currently happen to be following.

The gardener who asked me, Jan, has about 30cm of decent loam over a compacted layer. She's already removed her lawn and replaced it with gravel and stone paths, where low-growing thyme is doing rather well, and she'd love something approaching a dry garden but quite reasonably can't justify excavating tonnes of perfectly good soil to replace it with rubble and gravel. This summer she stopped watering most of the beds, apart from a few precious ferns and hostas, and reckons she lost about half the plants. I've seen a video of the garden from a few years ago — mature, densely planted, obviously the result of years of work. My first thought wasn't that she needed to dig it all up. It was that perhaps we need to think differently about what adapting a garden actually means.

This summer gave us rather a lot of information

There's a temptation after an extreme summer to treat what happened in our own gardens as anecdotal, but this year the national figures suggest otherwise. Summer 2026 was provisionally the warmest UK summer in a temperature series going back to 1884. The UK mean temperature was 16.5°C, 1.9°C above the 1991–2020 average, and England's mean was 18.2°C. Temperatures reached 38.1°C at Kew Gardens in August, and 38°C at Pershore in Worcestershire; fifty-four Met Office stations broke their all-time daily maximum during the summer.

Then there was the lack of rain. England received 132.9mm across the summer, only 64% of the 1991–2020 average. July was the driest on record for England, with only 10% of its long-term average rainfall, and by August 71% of England by land area was classified as being in drought.

For gardeners those aren't abstract statistics. They're dead plants — trees dropping leaves in July and August, lawns going brown, hydrangeas wilting, newly planted shrubs needing water far more often than expected, established plants suddenly struggling in positions where they'd previously been perfectly happy. But there's another side to it too: they're also the plants that didn't struggle. And I think we should be paying just as much attention to those.

Start with the survivors

If I were adapting an established garden after this summer, I wouldn't begin with a shopping list. I'd walk around it. What survived — not simply what stayed alive, but what actually coped reasonably well, what flowered, what kept its foliage, what recovered quickly once the rain finally arrived? Then what struggled — some plants may have looked dreadful but come back, others gone dormant and due to return, some genuinely gone. And where were they? That matters, because a garden isn't one environment. It can contain dozens of little ones.

A south-facing border against a wall behaves very differently from a bed ten metres away beneath a tree. Paving increases the heat around nearby plants. A hedge can shelter one part of a garden from drying winds while competing heavily for water beneath the soil elsewhere. Even within the same border, roots, shade, slopes, soil depth and nearby structures can change what a plant actually experiences. We've always talked about putting the right plant in the right place — I think we're going to have to get considerably better at understanding what the place actually is.

The plant hasn't read the label

Plant labels are useful, and I wouldn't want anybody walking round a garden centre ignoring them entirely. But they're guides. "Full sun." "Drought tolerant." "Moist but well-drained soil." Those descriptions can't tell you what happens in your particular square metre of Gloucestershire on a 37°C afternoon after six weeks without meaningful rain, and they can't tell you the apparently perfect sunny spot goes saturated every January.

The RHS itself now advises gardeners choosing drought-resistant plants to think about shade and soil type rather than drought tolerance on its own, and its guidance on soils that swing between wet and dry goes further — relatively few plants are highly tolerant of both extremes, so some experimentation in your own particular conditions is more or less inevitable. That matters, because we shouldn't be trading one overly simplistic way of choosing plants for another. If our whole response to climate change becomes walking round garden centres looking for DROUGHT TOLERANT on every label, I don't think we've actually solved anything.

Because winter hasn't disappeared

This is probably one of the most important parts of the whole discussion. We're talking about drought because we've just had an extraordinary summer, but that doesn't mean Britain's turning into the Mediterranean. UK climate projections point towards hotter, generally drier summers and warmer, wetter winters, though with considerable variation between years and regions. For England by the 2070s, the latest UKCP18 summary shows that under a high-emissions scenario summer rainfall changes could range from about 48% drier to 1% wetter, while winter precipitation could range from 2% drier to 35% wetter, and summer temperatures could be between 1.6°C and 5.5°C warmer. Those are ranges, not a weather forecast for your garden in 2075, but they illustrate the difficulty rather well.

We may increasingly be asking plants to cope with drought and heat in July and saturated soil in January. Anyone gardening on heavier soil already knows this problem — the RHS notes clay soils commonly experience exactly that combination, wet in winter and baked dry in summer. A plant beautifully adapted to hot, dry summers may still fail if its roots spend three months sitting in cold, waterlogged soil. Resilience isn't the same thing as drought tolerance.

Don't automatically dig up good soil

This brings me back to Jan's 30cm of loam over a compacted layer. My first reaction wouldn't be to excavate it — good topsoil is valuable. I'd want to understand what that compacted layer is actually doing first. Does water sit above it in winter? Does the garden puddle after heavy rain? How quickly does water infiltrate? Is it genuinely preventing drainage, or just something that happens to be there?

The RHS recommends actually assessing drainage before embarking on major work. One simple test involves digging a hole around 30–60cm deep and watching how long water stays in it — persistent water can point to a drainage problem, surface puddling can suggest compaction. That's a lot more useful than assuming every compacted layer needs breaking up. There may be places where localised decompaction, organic matter, slightly raised planting or better drainage is worth doing, and other places where the sensible answer is to leave the soil alone and choose plants that cope with it as it is.

Soil may be one of our greatest advantages

One of the oddities of dry-garden discussions is that gardeners sometimes assume they need to make their soil poorer and more freely draining before they can grow drought-tolerant plants. Sometimes that's right. Not always. Organic matter improves soil structure and can help both drainage and water-holding capacity, and the RHS recommends incorporating it when establishing drought-resistant planting, alongside suitable mulches to cut water loss from the surface. That's an interesting combination, because we're not necessarily trying to make the soil dry — we're trying to make the garden better able to cope when water's scarce and better able to handle it when water arrives. Those aren't quite the same thing. A decent depth of healthy loam capable of storing winter and spring rainfall may be an asset during a dry summer, and I'd be reluctant to throw that away without a very good reason.

Shade may become something we deliberately keep

For years gardeners have asked me what they can grow because a tree's casting shade over a border, and shade's traditionally been treated as something of a gardening inconvenience. After summers like this one I think that relationship may be changing. Trees obviously compete for water — anyone who's tried planting under a mature beech or a large conifer doesn't need me to explain that — but they also intercept sunlight, cool the ground and alter the microclimate beneath and around them. The RHS recently described trees, shrubs and climbers as natural air conditioners when encouraging autumn planting after this year's heat and drought.

So I certainly wouldn't look at an established garden and start removing mature woody plants just to create a dry garden. That patch of shade might turn out to be one of the most useful parts of it, and it might let us keep plants that would struggle badly elsewhere. Jan mentioned her precious ferns and hostas — perhaps the answer isn't to stop growing them, but to understand where in the changing garden they can still be grown successfully, and accept that those particular spots may get a bit of extra water.

I don't think watering should become a moral issue

There's something creeping into gardening conversations at the moment that bothers me slightly — the idea that a properly drought-resilient gardener never waters. I don't think that's particularly helpful. Water is a resource and we should use it intelligently, this summer's made that abundantly obvious — at the beginning of September, reservoir storage across England stood at only 58%, around 19 percentage points below average for the time of year, despite rain having returned to many areas. But deciding to use less mains water isn't the same as deciding never to water a plant.

Established plants in suitable positions should need much less help. Newly planted ones are different. The RHS recommends watering newly planted trees, shrubs and perennials regularly during establishment even when they're described as drought tolerant, and larger trees may need support for considerably longer, because drought tolerance usually describes what an established plant can do — roots have to get there first. Refusing to water a newly planted drought-tolerant perennial through its first dry summer doesn't really test its drought tolerance; it tests how quickly it can establish while dying of thirst.

When watering is necessary I'd rather water thoroughly and less often, getting moisture down into the root zone, than repeatedly wet the top centimetre or two of soil. RHS guidance suggests checking moisture has penetrated to around 15cm when watering established borders under drought stress. Collecting rainwater, watering selectively and concentrating it where it does something useful makes considerably more sense to me than either extreme.

Perhaps we should change the garden slowly

This may be the part of my answer to Jan that matters most. I wouldn't redesign the whole garden after one summer. I'd let it evolve. A dead plant creates a gap — before replacing it, I'd ask why it died. If the position's simply become too hot and dry for that plant, I'd try something different there. If several plants failed in the same area, perhaps that part of the border needs a more substantial rethink. If something beside them sailed through the summer apparently wondering what all the fuss was about, I'd make a note of that too. Over several years the balance of the garden begins to shift — some areas becoming more drought tolerant, others staying lush because they benefit from shade, a low point becoming somewhere to catch rainwater rather than somewhere we're forever trying to drain, an exposed border needing shelter as much as different plants. It isn't as dramatic as digging everything up and announcing you've built a climate-resilient garden. But I suspect it ends up more resilient.

Autumn may become increasingly important

There's another change worth considering, and it isn't about plants at all — it's about timing. For years the great gardening rush has been spring. Garden centres fill up, gardeners get enthusiastic, everything starts growing and we plant. The trouble is a shrub planted in April or May can now find itself facing serious heat and drought before it's developed much of a root system. This August the RHS specifically urged gardeners to treat autumn as being as important as spring for planting — cooler conditions reduce water loss, autumn and winter rainfall helps keep the soil moist, and roots have longer to establish before the following summer.

There are exceptions — less hardy Mediterranean plants and some warm-season grasses are better planted in spring so they can establish before winter, and very wet soils may make autumn planting unsuitable for some species too. There isn't one rule. But perhaps adapting our gardens means changing when we garden as well as what we grow.

We need to leave ourselves room to be wrong

I think this matters enormously. Climate change doesn't mean every summer from now on will be a repeat of 2026. There'll be wet summers, cold snaps, late frosts, prolonged winter rain, probably some combinations that catch us completely by surprise — even within the broad trend towards hotter summers, individual years will keep varying. So I'm wary of redesigning a garden around surviving one particular extreme. What I'm interested in is resilience, and a resilient garden isn't necessarily one where nothing ever suffers — I'm not sure such a garden exists. It's one that can absorb some of these changes without needing rebuilding every time the weather does something unexpected.

That may mean greater diversity in what we grow. It may mean keeping trees for shade, improving soil rather than replacing it, collecting water, easing off on thirsty planting in the hottest parts of the garden, and accepting a few favourite plants still deserve a watering can. And it probably means experimenting — the RHS makes essentially the same point about soils that swing between winter wet and summer drought: because relatively few plants are highly tolerant of both extremes, gardeners may just need to experiment in their own particular conditions. I rather like that. Gardens have always been experiments anyway.

The garden is already giving us the answers

Jan asked me how she could adapt the garden she already has. I don't think she needs to remove tonnes of soil and build an entirely different one — at least, I wouldn't start there. I'd start with the garden already in front of her. Look at what survived and what didn't. Notice where the soil stayed damp and where it dried first. See what happens when the winter rain arrives, where water sits and where it disappears. Keep the useful shade. Look after the plants that matter enough to justify a bit of extra attention. Then change things gradually — next summer will tell us something else, the winter after that will probably add another piece of information.

The difficulty with gardening for a changing climate is that we'd quite like somebody to hand us the new rules. I'm increasingly doubtful there are going to be any. There'll be guidance, better plant choices, better ways of managing water, a growing amount of research — but ultimately we're still going to have to garden. Observe, try something, occasionally get it wrong, notice what succeeds, adjust what we do next.

Perhaps adapting the garden we already have isn't about turning it into a completely different garden at all. It's about getting better at listening to the one that's already there.

— Marcus

Sources and further reading: Met Office summer 2026 assessment, Met Office UK climate projections, RHS drought-resistant gardening guidance, RHS guidance for seasonally wet and dry soils, and the Environment Agency's 2026 drought reports.

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Marcus Bergin

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