Xeriscaping
Drought-Tolerant Landscaping for Kent Gardens
Kent has had a run of dry seasons lately. Spring 2025 was one of the driest three-month stretches on record for the county, and South East Water brought in a hosepipe ban across its Kent supply area that summer. More clients are asking us the same question: how do we build a garden that still looks good when the ban starts? The answer isn't a garden full of gravel and cacti — it's better plant choices, smarter watering and a design that works with the weather rather than against it.
Plants that cope with a dry Kent summer
Some of the best-performing plants for dry, sunny borders have won the RHS Award of Garden Merit for exactly this reason — reliable performance without heavy watering. A few we plant regularly across our Faversham, Canterbury and Gravesend projects:
Lavender — compact, fragrant, and a magnet for bees and butterflies
Cistus (rock rose) — evergreen, flowers daily through summer, thrives on poor dry soil
Perovskia (Russian sage) — tall silvery spikes of blue-violet flowers from August
Spanish broom — bright yellow flowers into autumn, unbothered by exposed, dry ground
Ornamental grasses — movement and structure with minimal upkeep once rooted
Grouping plants with similar water needs together — rather than scattering thirsty and drought-tolerant species through the same bed — makes irrigation far more efficient and cuts down on wasted water.
Watering and mulching properly
Even drought-tolerant planting needs support in its first year while roots establish. Drip irrigation and soaker hoses deliver water straight to the roots instead of losing it to evaporation, and a good layer of mulch — bark, compost or gravel depending on the look — keeps moisture in the soil, suppresses weeds and protects roots from summer heat. It's one of the simplest, most cost-effective things a garden can have.
Designing around the weather, not against it
A few design choices make a real difference to how a garden copes with dry spells:
Reducing lawn area, or replacing high-maintenance turf with harder-wearing, drought-tolerant grass species
Using pergolas, trellises or planting to create shade over vulnerable beds
Positioning thirstier plants — vegetable beds, pots, new planting — closer to a water source
Choosing permeable paving and gravel over large areas of hard standing, so what rain does fall goes back into the ground
None of this means compromising on how a garden looks. If anything, it opens up planting combinations — silvery foliage, Mediterranean textures, long flowering seasons — that a lot of traditional English borders don't make use of.
Getting it right from the start
We plan every planting scheme around the site — soil, aspect, drainage and how the garden will be used — before anything goes in the ground. For a dry summer garden that's more important than ever: the right plant in the right spot needs a fraction of the water and maintenance of the wrong one.
If your garden struggles every summer, or you're planning a new border and want it to cope with whatever the weather does next, we're happy to talk it through.
What drought-tolerant landscaping actually means
A drought-tolerant garden isn't a dry, bare one. It's a garden built around plants and materials that need little watering once established, arranged so that water goes where it's needed rather than running off or evaporating.
The term for this is xeriscaping — landscaping designed around minimal irrigation — and while it's more commonly talked about in hotter, drier climates abroad, the same principles work just as well for a Kent garden coping with an increasingly unpredictable British summer. Done properly, it looks lush, colourful and full of life — it just doesn't rely on a sprinkler to get there.
Talk to us about construction work
If your project involves structural work and you want it handled properly from the start, we’d be happy to advise.