Planting for the future

Tom, from Milverton's Biocentric Plants, shares observations and advice about plants that will thrive in our changing climate, providing beauty in our gardens and sustaining our local wildlife:

Maybe this is just an extreme year, maybe we’ve just had two drought years in a row.  Maybe next year we’ll be in raincoats in July cursing the return of the ‘Great British Summer’.

For me this is just the likely scenario predicted by the best scientific modeling for the UK climate.  Hot dry summers, wet mild winters.  Extremes.  Chaos.  If the message didn’t get through last year, perhaps it has in 2026.

The standard english garden has struggled this year, many favorites and traditional stalwarts are failing or limping through the summer in poor shape with reduced flowering.  I have spent my evenings wandering with my notebook sketching plans and listing things to reposition in the garden or to simply remove.  There are many things that I would love to be able to grow but in the new climate, on my poor, dry sandy soil, I have to be realistic.  I have no interest in locking myself into a cycle of artificially feeding and irrigating the soil to allow myself the luxury of growing things that don’t want to grow here.  Instead I will keep evolving the garden, experimenting and being ruthless when I need to.   The silver lining in this cloudy situation is that there are always more plants to try.  Not only exotics, but natives and near natives that might have gone untried and unnoticed before.

In terms of native plants, I have been surprised at how well many have performed.  The white umbels of Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium) and Wild Carrot (Dorcas carota) have shone in the evening gloaming.  The various forms of Marjoram (Origanum vulgaris are always busy with bees and butterflys and the pincushions of small scabious (scabiosa columbaria), Field scabious (Knautia arvensis) and Devils Bit Scabious (Succisa pratensis) are just as popular.

In terms of non native plants there are many really useful additions to a dry garden.  Many of the Onion family in bulb or tuberous form (Allium angulosum for example) seem untroubled by the drought.  The mallows hold a wide range of great xeric (dry loving) plants, for example, the Hemp Leaved Mallow (Althaea cannibinum) from southern Europe is a wonderful tall perennial which seems unfazed by weather or soil condition.  Anisodontea ‘El Royo’ and Sphaeralcea ‘Newleaze Coral are more shrubby additions from near desert conditions that flower for 6-8 months of the year and are very popular with bees.

Perhaps the most visited plant in my garden at present is the Shrubby Hares Ear (Bupleurum fruticosum) an evergreen mediteranean shrub whose yellow umbels are dripping with almost every type of bee, wasp and hoverfly you can imagine.  A wonderful tough plant that gives much needed structure in dry soil in full sun.  A smaller, greyer shrub is the Otter Bush (Gomphostigma virgatum) which has the most beautiful fine glaucous foliage and sprays of small white flowers.

Honorable mention also goes to the Sages (Salvia sp) which are doing very well, or the Vervains (Verbena sp), Stonecrops (Sedum sp) or Pinks (Dianthus sp).  Many new plants to try and many experiments to make if you take a chance and let go of the things that don’t work anymore.  It’s a brave new world we’re living in, lets go into it with hope in our hearts and soil on our fingers.

Tom Neilsen, Biocentric Plants

http://www.biocentric.org.uk

tom@biocentric.org.uk