Should Plants Have a Resilience Rating?

Plant labels tell us quite a lot.

Sun or shade, eventual height, roughly when it'll flower. Instructions on soil, planting depth, feeding, watering, deadheading. A label might tell us a plant is hardy, suitable for containers, drought tolerant once established. All useful information — but I'm starting to wonder whether there's another question we should be asking.

How resilient are you, actually?

Not simply whether a plant survives a particular winter temperature, or manages a dry spell once its roots are established. I want to know what it's like when things get genuinely difficult. How does it cope with prolonged heat, drying wind, winter wet, an unexpectedly cold spring? If it's knocked back, how fast does it come back? How much of my time will it need to remain worth looking at?

That last part matters, because there's a real difference between a plant being technically alive and being worth growing in a garden. We've all seen plants that survived a hard season in the strictest sense — a bit of life still in the roots, a small patch of green near the base — while for most of the year the thing has looked scorched, collapsed or simply absent. Right beside it, something else has kept growing, flowering, earning its place in the border with barely any attention at all. Both plants survived. They didn't show anything like the same resilience.

Our usual plant descriptions don't capture that difference very well. "Drought tolerant" sounds reassuring, but drought tolerance is only one part of a much messier picture. A plant can cope with dry soil and still suffer badly in extreme heat — it may have enough moisture at the roots but be unable to replace what it's losing through the leaves fast enough. Strong sun scorches foliage, hot wind makes it worse, and reflected heat off paving or a south wall can push the plant into conditions far harsher than the forecast would suggest.

Two gardens in the same town can go through entirely different summers. So, in fact, can two plants on opposite sides of the same house. One beside a wall gets stored, reflected heat. Another sits in wind funnelling between buildings. Round the corner, something gets shade through the hottest part of the afternoon. Under a tree the air's cooler, but the roots are fighting much harder for water. We use the word "garden" as though it describes one set of conditions. Most gardens hold several.

A difficult year shows up those differences fast. Areas we'd always thought of as broadly similar suddenly behave completely differently — one border stays surprisingly fresh while another turns dry and stressed, a sheltered corner that usually protects plants becomes unbearably hot, and a patch of dappled shade we'd barely noticed turns out to be the most valuable ground in the garden.

Which is why a simple resilience rating gets difficult almost as soon as you try to build one. Resilient against what — drought, heat, cold, wind, flooding, winter wet, pests, disease? A plant might cope admirably with one and fail completely against another. Mediterranean plants get recommended for hot dry gardens all the time, but plenty dislike sitting in cold wet British ground over winter. Something that sails through a baking summer can vanish after a few months of poor drainage.

The real test isn't one season. It's the whole year. We might admire a plant that flowered right through heat and drought, only to find it can't handle the winter that follows. Another might retreat below ground in summer, looking to all appearances like it's died, then come back perfectly well once conditions ease. Was that plant less resilient for looking poor for months, or more resilient for knowing exactly how to protect itself?

Plants don't all respond to stress the way we'd like them to. Some keep flowering and looking presentable. Others drop foliage, stop growing, go dormant — which can be a perfectly effective survival strategy for the plant, even while it leaves an awkward gap in the border. That raises an uncomfortable question about what we actually mean by resilience: are we judging the plant's ability to survive, or its ability to keep performing for us? From the plant's point of view, retreating and returning next year is a complete success. From the gardener's, a brown patch for half the summer isn't quite what was intended. Neither view is wrong, but a genuinely useful label would need to tell the two apart — maybe two figures instead of one: how well a plant survives stress, and how well it goes on looking like the plant we bought.

Then there's recovery. A plant can look dreadful during drought and bounce back within days of decent rain. Another might stay green for longer but take damage that costs it a full year to recover from. What it looks like in the moment doesn't necessarily tell you which one is actually stronger — which means we should be wary of drawing conclusions at the end of a single hard season. We need to see what comes back, what regains its vigour, what's been genuinely weakened for good. A plant that would score highly in August might lose that score entirely by February. One that looked finished in autumn can surprise you completely by spring. Gardens have a habit of withholding the final result.

Age complicates it further. A plant established for several years has roots that can reach moisture a newly planted one simply can't get to yet. The mature plant copes without help; the same species, planted last spring, needs careful watering to get through its first couple of summers. Calling the species drought tolerant isn't wrong, exactly, but it can mislead anyone who assumes a young plant already has the resilience it may only develop later. "Drought tolerant once established" is a familiar phrase, and it still leaves questions hanging — how long is establishment? One season, two years, longer? Does that change on sandy soil, on heavy clay, under competing tree roots? How much water does it need while it gets there? A plant can become resilient. It may need a fair bit of help to arrive at that point.

How it was grown and planted matters too. A plant moving out of protected nursery conditions into an exposed garden has to adjust. Planting season, root development, how well the ground was prepared — all of it shapes how the plant responds. The same variety planted in autumn may be well established before summer stress arrives; one planted in late spring starts its life in the garden already at a disadvantage. We often judge the plant without accounting for the start we actually gave it.

Then there are the plants growing around it. Resilience isn't always an individual quality — plants protect one another. Taller growth filters sunlight, cuts wind, shades the soil. Low foliage covers bare ground and slows moisture loss. A plant tucked behind a shrub can avoid the worst of the afternoon heat, while the same plant stuck at the exposed front of the border gets scorched. A peony surviving because a cistus or euphorbia is sheltering it isn't proof the peony is independently heat tolerant — it tells you the planting around it has created conditions it can cope in, which may be more useful than any rating attached to a single plant on its own.

Garden advice tends to treat plants as isolated objects. We buy them individually, read their labels individually, place them according to their individual requirements. In the border they affect each other constantly — competing for water and light, but also creating shelter, shade and cover. A garden built for resilience may depend less on finding indestructible plants and more on arranging the plants it has so they look after one another.

Trees have a real part to play here too. Most of the advice around hotter summers has focused on plants that can tolerate more heat and dryness, which makes sense, but it risks assuming every garden simply has to become hotter and more exposed. We can change the conditions instead. A carefully placed small deciduous tree gives dappled shade, cools the ground, offers shelter through the worst part of the day. Shrubs filter wind. Dense planting and mulch cut down the bare soil exposed to sun. Water can be slowed, held, sent where it's actually needed. Instead of only asking which plants can put up with the problem, we can ask how the garden itself might reduce it.

Weeds and wild plants can offer a clue too. While the cultivated stuff struggles, something we never planted keeps growing vigorously regardless — which usually gets us annoyed, especially when it looks like it's thriving at the expense of everything we actually wanted. But its success tells us something. Anything growing naturally around us has already passed a local test: it copes with the soil, the rainfall, the temperature pattern well enough to reproduce without any help from us at all. That's not an argument for letting every weed stay or filling the garden with nothing but native wildflowers. It just means the vegetation already around us can point towards which plant families and growth habits actually suit the conditions. A wild achillea flourishing where a cultivated form is struggling doesn't guarantee every related variety will do well, but it's an interesting place to start — and looking at what does well in nearby gardens, verges and hedgerows can end up more useful than a generic list drawn up somewhere else entirely. Gardeners have always learnt by watching, but that kind of local knowledge may matter more and more as the old rules become less dependable.

Which is also why plant recommendations need care. Gaura, salvias, agastache, achillea and ornamental grasses get praised for sailing through a hard summer, and in another garden the same plants struggle badly. Neither account is necessarily wrong. What's missing is usually the soil, the rainfall, the age of the plant, the local wind, the hours of direct sun, what it was planted next to, whether it got water while it was establishing. A list of resilient plants without any of that detail quickly becomes just another promise the garden can't keep. There's no universal border, so there can't really be a universal list.

All of which makes a single resilience score look close to impossible. A number from one to five would be tidy, but it might hide as much as it reveals — a plant scoring well for drought could score badly for winter wet, and another might survive both but need constant fussing to look respectable. What we probably need isn't a rating but a profile: how much help it needs while establishing, how it copes with dry soil, how it handles prolonged heat and strong sun, whether it tolerates winter wet, what happens under stress, how fast it recovers, and how much ongoing attention it needs.

That's far too much for the average plastic label, especially one stuck in a tray holding half a dozen different plants. A small label is built to help us identify, place and care for something at the point of buying it. It was never going to describe what living with that plant is actually like five years on. Which might be the bigger gap in the way plants get sold — labels concentrate on getting the plant into the ground and looking good in the short term, and say very little about how it'll behave long-term, where it's vulnerable, or how much work it'll actually cost. How much will it spread? Will it still flower well after the first year? Does it collapse after rain? Will it need dividing, staking, regular watering? Will it come through a hard summer only to fail in a wet winter? These are the things gardeners find out later, usually the hard way.

There's a commercial logic to keeping labels simple and optimistic — "continuous flowering" sells better than a note explaining it'll need regular deadheading, feeding and watering to look anything like the photo. But if gardeners are increasingly choosing plants for tougher, less predictable conditions, resilience information needs to get more honest, not less.

Even a properly detailed profile wouldn't remove the need for trial and error. Gardens are too individual for that. A flower grower choosing plants for a business can research thoroughly and follow good advice, and still finds that testing plants on the actual ground is the only method that really tells them anything — which takes time and costs money, but produces knowledge specific to that one place.

Home gardeners can do a smaller version of the same thing. We can start keeping our own resilience notes — not just what flowered, but what needed watering, what suffered in heat, what came back after rain, what returned after winter. Patterns show up over a few seasons. We might find a plant that sailed through one extraordinary summer can't cope with the winter straight after it, or that something unimpressive in its first year turns almost indestructible once it's properly settled in. We might notice plants in dense, mixed borders doing better than isolated specimens surrounded by bare soil. Our own gardens can build their own resilience rating, even if it never makes it onto a label.

A truly resilient plant probably isn't one we can keep looking respectable through enough watering, shade cloth and sheer stubbornness. It's the one that fits the conditions well enough to get by without constant rescue — and that doesn't mean performing perfectly every day of the year. A plant's allowed to retreat, rest, have a scruffy season. Resilience isn't permanent flowering or immunity from damage. It's the ability to take a knock, recover, and carry on being part of the garden.

There are limits to all of it. No plant is resilient against everything, and the pressures themselves keep shifting — pests and diseases respond to changing conditions too, and a plant that becomes widely relied on tends to run into new problems of its own soon enough. Resilience will always be a moving target. A rating would help. It would never be the end of the conversation.

The label can tell us where to begin. The garden tells us what happens next.

Happy Gardening.

Marcus

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Marcus Bergin

Thoughts, observations and conversations from a life spent in gardens.