I'm so tired of constantly reading about "drought tolerant" plants. Every garden design, every plant being profiled is drought tolerant, to the point where the term is meaningless now, it's just what all plants are if they are not bog plants.
What does it even mean to slap that term on every plant, every garden? Does that mean the garden will survive on an inch of rain once a month? Once a week? Winter water?
Nothing grows with NO water, so how much?
There are obvious desert plants like succulents, cactus and desert scrub shrubs, but almost all others are universally labeled "drought tolerant". Do those plants look great or just not completely die until they get more frequent water?
What do they look like while they are "tolerating" dry conditions? And how dry? For how long?
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| From Le Jardinet's blog post of a New Zealand dry garden |
Beth Chatto's dry gravel garden is everyone's inspiration and it does have great ideas and examples. She admirably provides no supplemental water. But the average annual rainfall in her dry garden is 20 inches! Air humidity is high. It's England -- the dry side, yes -- but surrounded by ocean and temperate currents.
That is not a dry garden. Also that is not my garden. It's double, almost triple what my garden gets annually in a good year. It is not my cold steppe arid environment.
Drought tolerant once implied something meaningful. Now it’s broadly applied to:
- Mediterranean plants
- prairie plants
- xeric plants
- dry shade plants
- plants that survive a rainless couple weeks periodically
- and plants that need regular irrigation to look decent
Those are not equivalent categories.
This comment from a post at Le Jardinet in Seattle was interesting. She talks about what a truly drought loving plant could be:
Not drought-resistant, nor drought tolerant but drought-LOVING. An important distinction. If plants are to thrive rather than merely survive or tolerate the conditions we impose on them, this is a strategic mind-shift.
I like that distinction. "Drought tolerant" is as helpful as "plant right side up in soil". It doesn't describe what the plant might look like when you plant it in your garden.