What Are We Supposed to Plant Now?

There's something deeply reassuring about hearing rain after a long, dry summer.

Water starts running into empty butts, ponds slowly recover their edges, lawns show the first faint signs they might eventually turn green again. Plants that have spent weeks just holding themselves together seem to relax. Gardeners stand at windows watching rain with the sort of pleasure usually reserved for sunshine.

But a few hours, or even a few days, of rain don't undo a prolonged drought. The surface goes wet while the soil underneath stays dry. Rivers, reservoirs and groundwater take far longer to recover, and plants already damaged by heat don't repair themselves just because the weather's turned.

Watching rain come back after an exceptionally dry summer raises a question that's getting harder to answer.

What are we supposed to plant now?

The first answer usually offered is drought-tolerant plants. If summers are getting hotter and drier, it seems sensible to grow things that need less water, and garden centres, magazines and planting schemes increasingly point us towards silver foliage and Mediterranean associations. Reasonable enough as a starting point, but it isn't the whole answer.

Drought tolerance and heat tolerance aren't necessarily the same thing. A plant can have plenty of moisture at the roots and still be scorched by intense sun, high temperatures or hot drying wind. It might survive dry soil under moderate conditions and still struggle once its leaves are exposed to prolonged heat. We've seen plants collapse despite being watered. Others stayed technically alive but spent most of summer brown, damaged, doing very little — while right beside them something else kept flowering as though nothing unusual was happening. "Drought tolerant" doesn't tell us enough.

Mediterranean planting looks like the obvious answer. Plants adapted to hot dry summers should surely suit British gardens better as our summers get hotter and drier. Except we still have British winters.

Much of my gardening life has been spent on heavy clay, and anyone who's worked with clay knows how contradictory it can be. In dry weather it goes hard, cracked, almost impossible to work. In winter the same ground can stay cold and saturated for weeks. A plant that copes beautifully with summer drought can fail outright with its roots sitting in wet soil through January — and the problem often isn't the cold itself, it's the combination of cold and poor drainage.

What we actually need isn't merely a drought-tolerant plant. It's one that can go weeks without meaningful rain, take temperatures well into the thirties and hot winds through summer, then survive prolonged winter wet and possibly a severe cold spell a few months later. That's quite a lot to ask.

It's also why imported ideas need care. We can learn from gardens in hot, dry-summer places, but their winters can be very different. A planting scheme thriving in southern Spain, Madeira or California doesn't transfer onto Gloucestershire clay and behave the same way. Our future gardens may well borrow plants and ideas from all over, but they'll still have to answer to the conditions under our own feet.

This is where universal lists fall apart. A plant doing brilliantly in one garden can struggle a few streets away — soil depth, drainage, exposure, rainfall and shade all change the result, and even the same plant can behave differently on opposite sides of one house. There isn't going to be a definitive list called "Plants for the New British Climate". Conditions are too variable, and the climate itself isn't settling conveniently into one new pattern.

"New normal" gets used as though we've moved from one stable set of conditions into another — as though we just need to learn the new rules, choose the right plants, and carry on. I'm not convinced it'll be that tidy. What gardeners may actually be facing is a long period of change rather than a settled destination: hotter, drier summers in some years, intense rainfall and winter saturation and the odd cold snap in others. One year tests drought tolerance, the next exposes poor drainage. We could end up gardening not for one new normal, but for greater uncertainty generally.

That changes the question. Instead of asking whether a plant likes sun or shade, we may need to ask what range of conditions it can actually tolerate. How does it cope with heat, drought, wind, winter wet? Does it recover after stress? How much intervention does it need? Will it still contribute to the garden when conditions aren't ideal? The plants that answer those questions well aren't always the ones we've traditionally rated most highly.

Gardeners have often been wary of vigorous plants — the ones that spread, seed around, refuse to stay where they were put. We tend to prefer well-behaved, compact, suited to a carefully allotted space. In a more demanding garden, vigour might actually be an advantage. A plant that establishes strongly, finds moisture and recovers after damage can be worth far more than something exquisite that needs constant support. We may end up more tolerant of plants that move around, simply because those are the ones showing us where they can actually survive. That doesn't mean letting the strongest plant take the whole garden — vigour can tip into domination, and resilient weeds aren't necessarily plants we want everywhere. Bindweed remains bindweed, however impressively it copes with drought. But plants we once wrote off as too ordinary, too generous, slightly coarse, might deserve a second look.

The wild plants around us offer clues too. They've established without irrigation, feeding or careful positioning, and they cope with the local soil and weather well enough to reproduce. Closely related cultivated forms may not share all that resilience, but watching what thrives in the surrounding landscape gives us a more useful starting point than copying a border built under completely different conditions. If wild achillea, campanulas or certain geraniums are flourishing locally, their garden relatives are probably worth a look. If particular shrubs are surviving on exposed ground nearby, that tells us something too.

We should also look beyond individual plants, because a resilient garden isn't built simply by assembling a collection of supposedly indestructible species. Plants change the conditions around one another. Taller growth filters sunlight and cuts wind. Ground-covering plants shade the soil and slow moisture loss. A dense border protects itself very differently to a scatter of isolated plants surrounded by bare ground. Mulch helps retain moisture and support the soil, but living cover may do even more — bare soil exposed to strong sun heats and dries fast, while layered planting, trees over shrubs over perennials over ground cover, creates a genuinely more sheltered environment. That might change the look of future borders, too: the traditional image of individual specimens with clear soil between them giving way to denser plant communities, where each layer supports the resilience of the whole.

Small deciduous trees may matter more than we've given them credit for. Our instinct has usually been to look for plants that can tolerate more sun and heat directly. But instead of asking every plant to withstand increasingly exposed conditions, we can create shade instead. A well-placed tree cools the ground, shelters people and wildlife, and lets a much wider range of plants keep growing beneath it. In a hotter garden, shade stops being just a design consideration and starts being infrastructure.

Shrubs can do something similar on a smaller scale — filtering wind, protecting more vulnerable plants, providing the lasting framework perennials grow within. A plant surviving behind a shrub may not be independently heat tolerant at all, but the combination works. The resilient garden may end up being less about heroic individual plants and more about the relationships between them.

Soil will stay central to all this. Heavy clay is an awkward combination — it holds valuable moisture through dry periods and can waterlog through winter — and replacing it across a whole garden would be impractical, expensive and probably unnecessary anyway. The aim is more likely to work with its strengths while softening its worst tendencies: organic matter, surface mulching, avoiding unnecessary compaction, all improving structure over time. Slightly raised areas or gravelly pockets can give drainage where it's needed, while other parts of the garden keep the moisture-loving planting clay actually supports well. Rather than trying to make the whole garden behave like one soil type, we can build different conditions for different plant communities within it.

Containers deserve another look, too. Pots give us control over soil and drainage, and let tender or vulnerable plants be moved when they need to be — useful under trees, useful for filling seasonal gaps. They're also among the least resilient parts of many gardens during drought. Limited volume dries out fast, and a big collection of pots can demand daily watering, so a garden leaning heavily on dozens of containers can become genuinely hard to keep up through hot summers or a hosepipe ban. That doesn't mean giving up on pots. It might mean fewer, larger containers, grouped together, chosen more carefully, with regular watering reserved for the ones that give enough pleasure to justify it. Every adaptation is really a choice about where our effort and water matter most.

Annuals may take on a different role, too. We tend to treat perennials as the permanent, economical choice and annuals as temporary decoration, but a perennial that thrives all summer and dies every winter in wet ground isn't especially permanent either. Some heat-loving plants might be more sensibly grown as one-season plants — raised from seed or cuttings, enjoyed through summer, without being asked to survive a winter they were never going to manage. That could get expensive if it means buying mature plants fresh every spring, and adaptation shouldn't quietly turn gardening into an annual shopping trip only affordable to those with money to spare. Propagation, seed saving and plant swapping offer another route. Gardeners have always shared plants, and that habit may matter more than ever — a cutting from something that's already succeeded locally tells you more than a generic label ever will. The plants passed over the fence could turn out to be a real part of how gardens adapt.

Cost can't be left out of this either. Climate adaptation sometimes gets presented as an exciting chance to redesign the garden, install sophisticated irrigation, rebuild drainage, experiment with new plants — and there are creative possibilities in that, but not everyone can afford them. A serious rainwater-harvesting system, a full redesign or major soil work can run to thousands of pounds. Even repeatedly replacing plants that haven't worked out is a real cost for gardeners on a tight budget. There are cheaper routes too — water butts, homemade collection systems, repurposed materials, division, seed saving, shade from a sensibly chosen tree, soil protected by planting and mulch — and ingenuity gets you a long way. But it would be wrong to pretend everyone has equal resources, space, physical ability or control over their own property. A tenant, a pensioner and the owner of a large established garden are facing very different choices. For plenty of people, adaptation won't feel like an opportunity. It'll be damage limitation — working out what can reasonably change, what can no longer be grown, and what just has to be accepted.

There's a deeper discomfort in all this too. Changing what we plant doesn't address why the conditions are changing in the first place. Finding plants that tolerate heat and drought may let us keep gardening, but it doesn't solve climate change. Gardens can still contribute something positive — trees give shade and habitat, healthy soil holds water and supports life, peat-free compost, fewer chemicals, reused materials, wildlife-friendly planting and less reliance on intensive inputs all matter. But adaptation shouldn't get confused with prevention. We can make gardens better able to cope while still recognising that the need to do so is itself a sign of environmental disruption, not a convenient excuse to expand the planting palette.

The future British border probably won't arrive as a clean break with the past. Roses aren't going anywhere — on moisture-retentive clay, established roses can go on performing remarkably well. Geraniums, salvias, grasses, achilleas and plenty of familiar plants will remain, even if not every variety suits every garden. The overflowing English border was never a fixed thing anyway. Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West worked with the plants, knowledge and conditions available to them at the time, and the gardens inspired by their work have kept changing ever since. We may keep the feeling of those borders while gradually changing what creates it — some plants becoming more prominent because they cope, others retreating to cooler or better-drained corners, annuals filling summer gaps where tender perennials can't survive winter, trees and shrubs building more shade, planting growing denser to protect the soil. The border can stay recognisably ours without staying botanically unchanged.

We won't know after one summer which plants have truly succeeded. The test runs on through winter and into the following spring. Some plants that looked finished will return. Others that seemed triumphant in the heat will fail in wet ground over winter. We need the time before we start declaring winners.

That might be the most honest answer to what we should plant now. Watch what survives locally. Pay attention to what's already thriving in your own garden. Propagate what proves itself, improve the conditions where you can, and experiment without rebuilding everything at once. The garden will tell us more than any list — it'll just take a few seasons to give us the answer.

We're not simply looking for plants that can survive one dry summer. We're learning how to build gardens that can get through extremes, recover from them, and keep changing.

I don't know exactly what that future border will look like. None of us does yet.

But it's probably already begun growing.

Happy Gardening.

Marcus

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Marcus Bergin

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