The best ways to plant a future-proof garden

The oft-quoted advice of “right plant, right place” has, for good reason, become an all-encompassing mantra for gardeners. But what happens when you add extreme conditions to the mix? Or the unpredictable changes in seasonal norms that delivered a seemingly endless drought across swathes of the country last summer, as well as record-breaking temperatures, followed by unusually low rainfall through winter across parts of Europe and the UK?

For even the most experienced gardeners and plants people, the current conditions are challenging, the future conditions uncertain.

“People are saying let’s embrace Mediterranean plants and planting, but it’s not that simple,” says Dan Pearson. “We are getting these hugely long wet periods in the autumn that are the death of those things if you don’t have free drainage. Or they survive very dry summers, then fail immediately in the winter.”

For the designer, the right plant, right place ethos becomes paramount, and the role of adaptive and resilient plants is now centre stage. Few gardens deal with conditions as extreme as those that face his Little Dartmouth project – a farm sitting on top of a Devon cliff with outstanding sea views and the intense exposure to wind, sun and salt that comes with them.

Pearson began working on the design 12 years ago and it’s one of three case studies in his second online course for Create Academy, this time focused on planting design. “It polarises things, this site – the things that like it, really like it, and the things that don’t very, very quickly fail.”

Pearson’s design entirely reimagined the site, including a new driveway that sweeps around the property, revealing the incredible sea views. Five acres of wildflower meadows were added boosting biodiversity and helping to connect the house to farmland beyond. And existing shelter belts were bolstered with new evergreen and deciduous oaks, Sorbus intermedia (“a really good tree for exposed conditions,” says Pearson), and additional pines.

A clever and understated terrace with a ha-ha was made in front of the house, with resilient planting that would complement the sea views but also take almost the full brunt of the coastal exposure. Pearson describes the exposed terrace at the front of the Devon house as “the frontline” and plants need to be virtually bombproof in these conditions.

Phillyrea angustifolia is clipped into domes that echo the trees beyond, airy Verbena bonariensis brings a sense of movement, and lower down, the soft pink Phlomis italica and Centranthus alba add to the soft colour palette. Erigeron karvinskianus fills in the gaps around the base of plants and readily self-seeds around the terrace. Banks of lavender are clipped for winter, contributing to the year-round structure.

But the masterstroke at Little Dartmouth is the walled garden, created by removing an old asbestos-roofed barn and liberating a concreted farmyard as the location for a more protected space, which encompasses a pool and deep borders enclosed by outbuildings and dense boundary hedging, and alongside it, a productive garden and orchard.

The whole garden acts as an excellent test bed for adaptive planting with lessons for almost all gardeners thinking about how to future-proof their spaces. First up – create the conditions. You may not be able to change your garden’s position but you can use all sorts of tricks to adjust the natural elements.

Pearson uses a multilayered approach to create protected pockets. Firstly, with a long “wall” of screening evergreens, including bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) and perhaps more surprisingly, griselinia: “It’s a horrible municipal hedge in seaside towns. But we’ve clipped it into beautiful shapes and it’s fabulous. It’s absolutely indestructible.” One of the first things Pearson did in the process was to look at the local area and see which plants were thriving – a simple idea that saves a lot of costly failures.

Next, the space was broken up with trees – including walnuts, magnolias and hoherias – a New Zealand native – and around them lower level shrubs and deciduous plants. As they mature the trees create shade and small microclimates where other less resilient plants can thrive. But also they bring height, balancing out lateral space and they help create zones, breaking up a garden into small rooms with different atmospheres and focal points.

For some gardeners, part of futureproofing will be about maintenance too. Working out how much labour will be needed is a fundamental starting point in the design process (Pearson suggests the common formula used in his projects is one full-time gardener for each acre of garden).

But clever design can also help minimise the amount of work. Much of the walled garden space consists of clipped evergreens and sprawling shrubs – such as Euphorbia x pasteurii that creates a lush protective mound around a swimming pool – while more maintenance-heavy areas of perennial planting fill in the zones between.

But even here, beds are densely planted to minimise weeding. And wherever possible, ground-cover plants including epimediums, Iris lazica, tiarellas and tellimas are deployed to reduce weeding further. “It’s about finding which plants are adaptable to being in close proximity to others; then you get this very effective layering, protecting the ground,” says Pearson.

Altogether, the shade from the trees, the protection of shrubs and ground-cover plants then allow the planting of more delicate plants that have a barrier around them. “It’s a choreography, making these microclimates,” he adds. “It’s like putting a band together to get the right balance of things.”

Sustainability should be part of future-proofing too. At Little Dartmouth this included keeping materials on site. Topsoil was removed from the new wildflower meadows to reduce fertility and then relocated to create planting areas in the walled garden.

All of the waste concrete removed from the old farmyard was crushed and repurposed as the new driveway. “Everyone is doing this now but it wasn’t commonplace then,” he says, referring to when the project began, more than a decade ago. “The circular thinking here was embedded from the beginning. We are encouraging people to have a much lighter imprint and that thinking often becomes a joyful part of the experience. It makes sense financially as much as anything else.”

Similarly, water is harvested from roofs and used in the garden, for example filling up a stone trough that sits in the herb garden to provide not only a watering stop but a beautiful focal point and a place for birds and insects to swoop down.

The natural consequence of all of these steps has been a biodiversity boom. As well as the meadows and bolstered shelter belts, and hedges and woods of mixed natives, perennial planting is packed with pollinator-friendly plants, where the season is extended for as long as possible. “It’s an important part of all the gardens we make now,” says Pearson. “And it does make the most enormous difference, when you get all those things coming together. There is this interesting balance to be struck between ecology and horticulture – it’s often siloed, but when you bring them together you get the power of two.”

He’s sanguine about how the English garden will need to evolve, especially in summer: “We need to adapt our whole aesthetic. Expecting our gardens to be singing and dancing all summer is something we are going to have to get used to changing. In the Mediterranean many gardens close down in the summer. If you can accept that’s the way things are going to go and welcome a different aesthetic then it starts to open up a whole raft of exciting possibilities.” He views popular horticultural campaigns such as “No Mow May” as a positive step to pushing gardeners to reconsider the traditional English garden.

“A dry meadow is not the same as a dead lawn – it’s a beautiful thing, as opposed to looking like something that has failed. It seems to be an easy shift to make.” He celebrates the plants that will now thrive, including Californian poppies, which will now flourish in hotter summers.

From his studio window, Pearson looks out to the two ancient ash trees that are the making of his Somerset skyline.

“Every day I am looking at those and making the most of them in my mind. I’ve planted some new limes by them and I will never see those limes in maturity but it’s a good feeling to know they are there for when the ash goes. Gardeners are an adaptive group of people.

“We can do something collectively that is putting our mindset in the right place.”

Dan Pearson’s Expert Guide to Planting Design with Create Academy is now live at createacademy.com and costs £147 for lifetime access