Smart Planting for the dry days of summer

Ewan MacKenzie has his eye on the weather. He sees that heavy rain is in the forecast, but he also knows things are going to change.

Summer is coming and just as sure as there are puddles everywhere in spring, there will be parched earth and thirsty gardens once we get a string of sunny days.

“Eighty per cent of the year we have a problem getting rid of water here,” says MacKenzie, co-owner of Exemplar Horticulture, of Abbotsford.

“And yet, come summer, we are all on watering restrictions. We can get 60 to 100 inches of rain a year and the same area can be bone dry in summer. It sounds a little crazy but that is the reality in many gardens.”

MacKenzie thinks the answer for many gardeners looking for a low-maintenance landscape is to make better use of drought-tolerant plants — ones that are hardy enough to survive the cold and wet of winter, provided soil is well drained, and capable of flourishing with minimal watering through the overheated days of summer.

“When most people think of drought-tolerant gardens, they think of adobe buildings and cactus, which is totally false.

“That may be the case in Southern California or Arizona, but there are a lot of areas here in B.C. where people have drought problems, such as on the Gulf Islands, where many people don’t have their own water supply and have to harvest rainwater from their roof.”

When MacKenzie moved from Scotland to Abbotsford 16 years ago, he was surprised to find a total ban on watering lawns.

“That really drove it home to me that we have got to be more creative in our use of plants. Now we are going to have water metering. There has never been a more important time to concentrate on getting the right drought-tolerant plant in the right place.”

MacKenzie is one of the main suppliers of ornamental grasses in Western Canada, sending drought-tolerant species to the B.C. Interior as well as into Alberta.

He uses the terms “drought-tolerant gardening” and “smart gardening” interchangeably; to him, they are one of the same.




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