In the walled garden of a former monastery outside Montpellier, the lawns are gone. Where manicured grass once stretched between clipped box hedges, there are now drifts of silver-leaved plants: lavender cotton, wild thyme, feather grass that ripples in the slightest breeze. In late summer, when the rest of the region is parched and brown, the garden is still alive with bees. Its designer, Clémence Aubrac-Lindahl, calls it a garden for the climate of 2100. She does not expect to live to see it mature.
Aubrac-Lindahl is one of a growing number of landscape designers who have concluded that the gardens of the past cannot survive the climate of the future. Across southern Europe and increasingly further north, the classic elements of the formal garden, from emerald lawns to thirsty roses and moisture-loving borders, are struggling through longer droughts, fiercer heatwaves and unpredictable rain. Water restrictions have made traditional maintenance impossible in many regions. Designers are being forced to rethink what a beautiful garden can be.
The answer, for many, lies in plants from drier parts of the world, and in the plant communities that already thrive in harsh conditions nearby. The Mediterranean garrigue, the steppe of Central Asia and the dry grasslands of South Africa and California have become sources of inspiration. These plants are adapted to poor soil, intense sun and months without rain. Grown together in dense, layered communities, they shade the ground, conserve moisture and require almost no irrigation once established.
Beauty without water
The resulting aesthetic is quite different from the lush green ideal that has shaped European gardens for centuries. Dry gardens are silver, grey and gold rather than green, textured rather than smooth, changing dramatically through the seasons. In summer, many plants go dormant, and the garden shifts into a palette of seed heads, dried stems and sculptural forms. Designers argue that learning to see beauty in this cycle is part of the work, for gardeners and for the public alike.
A garden is always a letter to the future. We are finally writing it in the right language.
Aubrac-Lindahl's methods borrow as much from ecology as from horticulture. Before planting, she spends a year observing a site: where water collects after storms, which areas bake in the afternoon, which wild plants arrive on their own. Her gardens are planted densely and left to evolve, with plants seeding, spreading and dying back according to their own logic. Maintenance consists of editing rather than controlling. Many of her clients find this hard at first, then liberating.
Public institutions are following. Several botanical gardens in Europe have established trial beds to test which plants can survive projected conditions later this century, and city parks departments are replacing bedding schemes with drought-resistant meadows. In Seville, a new public garden by the studio Paisaje Lento has been planted entirely with species expected to thrive in temperatures several degrees hotter than today, turning the park into a living experiment open to anyone who wants to walk through it.
There is something poignant in designing gardens for a future one will not see. Trees planted now will take decades to provide shade; plant communities will take years to find their balance. Aubrac-Lindahl accepts this with equanimity. Gardening, she points out, has always been an act of faith in time. On a hot afternoon in Montpellier, she walks slowly along the gravel paths, pausing to crush a leaf of wild sage between her fingers. “The people who come after,” she says, “will know whether we were right.”
