Plants adapted to climate change With summers generally getting hotter, it makes sense to use plants in the garden that once established won’t need regular watering. Beth Chatto’s gravel garden and the RHS Hyde Hall’s dry garden, both in Essex, are fantastic examples of drought-tolerant planting. This kind of planting is especially useful in front gardens that get watered less, or south facing gardens. Drought-tolerant plants often originate from hot, dry environments and have adapted in different ways to cope with the conditions. They also tend to like well-drained soil, so add grit or sand to clay soils. Grey or silver-leaved plants conserve water by reflecting the sun. Stachys byzantina (Lamb’s ears) with its woolly silvery low growing leaves is a lovely example of this (S. ‘Silver Carpet’ has smaller neater leaves than S. ‘Big Ears’). Convolvulus cneorum is a fab small evergreen sub shrub with shiny silvery leaves and masses of white flowers throughout the summer, and Ballota pseudodictamnus is a more unusual evergreen sub-shrub with rounded furry grey-white leaves. Sun-loving cistus varieties with …