How to Succeed with No-Watering Gardening, by Carol Bruce

20th July 2026

Carol Bruce’s garden at Old Bladbean Stud in Kent was founded on the principle of no watering from the start, so she has 23 years of experience with gardening under a self-imposed hose pipe ban. By experimentation and trial and error she has created a self-sufficient, drought-proof tapestry of colour-schemed perennial species that looks like a traditional garden but functions according to natural processes, effectively harnessing evolution as the garden’s resilience technique. Her new book In Nature’s Slipstream shares her novel design techniques and maintenance methods together with the plants she uses and instructions on how to integrate her system into an existing garden. In the following extract from the book, she also shares some additional tips on how gardeners and gardens can thrive in drought conditions without piped water:

Extract from In Nature’s Slipstream, p 198-199:

“The decision not to water has far-reaching implications in the garden and leaves its mark on how and when I do certain jobs, what I can grow, and how to encourage plant health. Clearly drought tolerance becomes a key consideration in choosing what to grow, but that is just the start. There is no point in planting expensive pot-grown plants in late April and then just watching them die. Instead, growing plants from seed gave me an inexpensive way of sourcing large quantities and made me more sanguine about the inevitable losses. Not being able to water plants struggling to establish in hot weather rules out planting anything during the growing season. As a result, I limited myself to planting between 1st November and 1st March, and this means I can’t grow tender perennials, half-hardy annuals, or bedding plants in the garden at all.

“In the rose garden the decision not to water steered my choice of roses more towards the old varieties. My reasoning was that any rose widely grown long before the supply of mains water was more likely to have earned its spurs unaided. Tubs and baskets are incompatible with a no-watering regime, so they were never a feature here apart from a few small tubs of sempervivums, Silene unifora that obligingly roots through the bottom of the pot, and an indestructible acer that has survived on rainwater for over 20 years. With hindsight I should have designed the garden with less lawn generally and certainly made it less prominent, as with earlier and more intense heatwaves, this is sure to become a recurring issue in the future.

“When heatwaves, drought, and a hosepipe ban coincided in 2022, it was fascinating to see how the self-sowing understorey in the rose garden held up. Having spent the previous 19 years being subjected to natural selection, the understorey had adapted incrementally over the years to increasingly harsh conditions. Anything that couldn’t cope was already dead, so it sailed through completely unscathed. The following flowering plant species stood out as particularly heat- and drought-tolerant at the time:

You can find out all about Carol’s tried and tested no-watering gardening system and how to apply it at home in In Nature’s Slipstream, published by DK and available here: