Parts of one of England’s most famous gardens are turning brown this summer, and it’s a sign of what’s coming for gardeners across the country. Beth Chatto’s legendary gravel gardens in Essex, which have gone unwatered since they were created in 1992, are showing real signs of stress in 2026 as dry conditions bite harder than ever.
The gardens, built on what used to be a car park near Clacton, were always meant to be a living experiment. Essex is the driest county in the UK, and Chatto’s whole idea was to prove that the right plants, in the right soil, could survive without irrigation. For decades it worked beautifully. But this year, even those tough, drought-tolerant species are struggling.
The head gardener at the Beth Chatto Gardens says the current conditions are a wake-up call for anyone who still thinks English summers are reliably wet enough to grow whatever they like. The reality is changing fast, and gardens that were perfectly fine ten years ago are now gasping by July.
So what can you actually do?
The first thing is to rethink what you’re planting. Mediterranean plants like lavender, rosemary, cistus and verbascum are built for this. So are ornamental grasses, sedums and many of the silver-leaved plants you see in sunny borders. These aren’t just drought-tolerant, they often look better in dry conditions than they do in a soggy English autumn.
Native wildflowers are also worth considering. Yarrow, wild marjoram and field scabious all cope well with dry summers and have the added bonus of being brilliant for pollinators. If you’re starting from scratch with a border, mixing in plenty of grit or gravel to improve drainage actually helps in both wet and dry conditions, because it stops roots sitting in waterlogged soil during winter while also encouraging them to go deeper in summer when the top layer dries out.
For lawns, the advice is simple but hard for some people to accept: let it go brown. Grass almost always recovers once rain returns. Watering a lawn during a dry spell is one of the least efficient uses of water in the garden, and with hosepipe bans becoming more common across England, it’s also increasingly restricted.
Grey water is something more gardeners are turning to, and for good reason. Water from baths, showers and washing-up can be used on most ornamental plants without any problems. The key things to avoid are putting grey water on vegetables you’re going to eat raw, and not letting it sit around for more than a day or two as it can start to smell and harbour bacteria. A simple bucket system works fine for most people, though there are also purpose-built grey water diverters you can fit to pipes.
Rainwater harvesting is the other obvious step. A single water butt connected to a downpipe can collect hundreds of litres from one decent rainfall. If you have the space and budget, linking multiple butts together massively increases your storage capacity. It’s not a glamorous garden project, but in a dry summer it makes a huge difference.
Mulching is probably the single most effective thing you can do to reduce how much water your garden needs. A thick layer of organic mulch, wood chip, garden compost or even gravel around your plants dramatically cuts down on evaporation from the soil surface. It also suppresses weeds, which compete with your plants for whatever moisture is available. The best time to mulch is in spring when the soil still has some moisture in it, but doing it now will still help.
Watering technique matters too. A slow, deep watering once or twice a week is far better than a quick splash every day. Deep watering encourages roots to grow downwards where the soil stays cooler and retains moisture longer. Shallow daily watering keeps roots near the surface where they dry out fastest.
Beth Chatto spent decades arguing that working with your conditions, rather than fighting them, was the smarter approach to gardening. With English summers trending drier and hotter, that philosophy feels less like an interesting experiment and more like straightforward common sense.