Hint: my top landscape plant is not a daylily. Or IS it?
If you know this blog, you know I LOVE plants. So when it was decided one of our GDRT topics this year would be top landscape plants, I thought, “Oh boy.” It would be very, very difficult for me to tell you what my top plant picks for the landscape are for a few reasons:
1. I love them all.
2. My favorites change from day to day.
3. Most importantly, it depends on the site. What’s the context? What’s the soil like? How’s the light? And so on, and so on, ad infinitum.
But. BUT! What I can and will share with you is the common threads when it comes to just about everything I plant. That is, I plant low-water plants wherever possible.
Folks, if there is one gardening thing that rankles me more than any other, it is watering plants. I usually have an anecdote to draw on when it comes to beliefs I garden by, but I’ve never lived in a place where water was TRULY scarce, so I can’t tell you where my rabid aversion to watering comes from. But interestingly, even though I don’t live in a dry climate, my little Mass. town must restrict outside watering every summer because we get ALL of our water from a river that’s running very low. What’s more important, water to drink and a rich, riparian ecosystem, or your lawn and garden? No garden — and I mean no garden, not yours or mine — is that important.
I will water a plant just until it’s established — and only just, because I want it to adapt to less watering — and beyond that, if it consistently needs water, I relocate it to a shadier site and/or one where the soil isn’t so dry. I make occasional exceptions in times like last year’s drought, but even then I only do damage control, mostly with a watering can filled at the rain barrel. (Yep, a watering can.)
Enough soapboxing. You came here for pictures! There are so many great low-water plants for the Northeast, and since we are more temperate than other parts of the country, some are droughty for us that may not be elsewhere. Below are just a few. Meanwhile, be sure to check out my fellow Roundtablers’ top plant picks, along with our special guest poster Nan Ondra!
Nan Ondra : Hayefield : Bucks County, PA
Andrew Keys : Garden Smackdown : Boston, MA
Christina Salwitz : Personal Garden Coach : Renton, WA
Genevieve Schmidt : North Coast Gardening : Arcata, CA
Ivette Soler : The Germinatrix : Los Angeles, CA
Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO
Laura Livengood Schaub : Interleafings : San Jose, CA
Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK
Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In the Garden : Los Altos, CA
Rochelle Greayer : Studio G : Boston, MA
Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA
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Andrew, Were you watching me water my garden last summer…damage control, rain barrel, watering can? I often tell people my garden is composed of plants that only thrive on neglect because all the others have already died. I look for drought-tolerant plants too but mainly because I’m too lazy to coodle them after the 1st year and we have no intention of installing an irrigation system. Thanks for the colorful display of top plants. The ‘Axminster Gold’ is a new one for me, I love the way the leaves look like they’re caressing the nearby plant.
Ugh, I hate watering too, Andrew. As dreary as this spring has been with rain practically every day, at least watering hasn’t been an issue - yet.
Thanks for sharing your top picks. That combination of lamb’s ears and Sedum sieboldii is fantastic!
Great post, Andrew! Love that Origanum ‘Pilgrim’ especially. So when you say no water, Massachusetts boy, you mean no supplemental water, because you get rain in the summer, right?
Hello fellow Sedum seboldii lover! Funny we both used this plant in today’s post! I love your low-water selections, too - perfect for my poor, water starved state!
Great wake up point to make!
Hot and summery in uk in April?
Insane!
And God knows when it last rained.
But then it will rain for 40 days running, so what do we do then?
Thanks
R
At least one of your selections is growing in my Austin, Texas, garden, baked by the Death Star and still looking beautiful. Like you, I rely on drought-tolerant plants. But of course our version of drought-tolerant is probably different from yours. While natives and other well-adapted plants may survive in our region without supplemental water, in droughty years like this they still need a drink every so often to avoid going completely dormant. I hate putting clean drinking water on the garden though and wish there were readily available and affordable gray water systems for climates like ours. I know the Australians are working on it.
Hey, don’t feel you need to get off the soap box for ME! There is so much more to a thoughtful approach to water conservation - protecting our watersheds, reducing the embedded cost of water management and the specific issues you mention in your community that it’s something everyone should be aware of. But on to the plants!
I’m particularly taken with the comfrey, which I thought was always a high water plant. It might not be so tolerant in my less humid, summer-dry climate but I might tuck a few into my garden just to test the theory.
Great post…love this set…especially the grasses and Agastache…I can’t get enough of those…and luckily, they look great together!
Thanks SO much for your comments everybody! I wish I were able to reply more thoroughly! I appreciated that a few of you pointed out that low-water plants in the Northeast are not necessarily the same as low-water plants in other parts of the U.S. I tried to emphasize that specifically.
I am so taken with your sedum and lamb’s ear photo - I have a VERY healthy patch of lamb’s ears with a little bare spot around the front - I know what’s going there for sure!
Susan, be careful of that comfrey in our climate. I’ve long admired this gorgeous plant, but have a number of clients for which it proved invasive in my zone 9 rainy clime. Like, we’re still ripping it out five years on. I think it’s much better-behaved for everyone else! Andrew, I envy that you can grow this one well, because those leaves are to die for.
So enjoyed your post, especially since we’re practically neighbors…. and I had quite a chuckle too. Last summer was the first in recent memory where we had a watering ban here in Newburyport. It was a voluntary ban, but from what we saw, folks were very respectful of it. Lawns suffered the most. Fortunately for us, we don’t have one (a lawn). When we got married my husband mentioned that he hated to mow the lawn. I told him that I had the perfect solution - we dug up all the grass (well, 90 percent, anyway) and planted gardens. We added a new bed last spring and I am so enjoying the round table and getting some great ideas for things to add into that area. Thanks so much everyone!
Andrew-Dammit! I wish I’d thought of the sedum/stachys pairing myself. It’s drop dead gorgeous! I don’t water unless it hasn’t rained in at least three weeks or a plant is newly planted (and even then sometimes not). I believe in tough plants. Thanks for your picks.
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