I’d like to have a drought-tolerant garden, but I find most drought-tolerant plants ugly. Do you have any suggestions?
Fortunately, water-wise gardening doesn’t mean ripping out your favorite plants and replacing them with ones that look like they were dragged home from a vacant lot. There are many plants - shrub roses and purple coneflowers, for instance - that are both attractive and water-efficient. And while incorporating these plants into your garden can certainly be part of the solution, it’s by no means the only one.
Changing your watering habits is the first step to being a more water-efficient gardener. A lot of water gets wasted by people watering ineffectively, either because they're doing shallowly (which requires them to water more frequently) or because they're doing it during the hottest part of the day when the majority of the water coming from the sprinkler is lost to evaporation.
Plants can be trained to want less water. If you water your plants once a week starting in early spring, they'll develop deep roots which will be more resistant to drought later in the season. Water too often and the opposite will happen. That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to reduce a fern to the watering requirements of a sedum, but you can make it so that your fern is significantly more water tolerant than it would've been had you not put the effort into controlling its water requirements.
Incorporating water-efficient plants into your garden is a good idea, but it takes a bit of planning since placing them into beds that contain water-guzzlers can be counterproductive. The better plan is to redesign your garden so that drought-tolerant plants are grouped together in one location and plants that require more water are grouped together in another. If you're really on the ball, you'll locate the plants that require more water closer to the hose and those that require less, further away from it.
Instead of making specific plant recommendations, which inevitably leads to a long, boring list of names you could easily look up any number of places, I’ll tell you what to look for when shopping for water-efficient plants.
As a general rule, annuals require more water than perennials and plants with large leaves are rarely drought-tolerant. Instead look for plants that have narrow, hairy, waxy and/or fleshy leaves. And definitely check into native plants since they were designed for local growing conditions. Spring bulbs, though technically more drought-avoiding than drought-tolerant, are also a good investment.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at vanessa@gardenmuse.ca.
Originally published in the Creston Valley Advance.
