The title of the new book Designing the Lush Dry Garden: Create a Climate-Resilient, Low-Water Paradise reveals much of what you need to know about what’s between the covers, but hearing the story behind it will tell you a lot more.
Like every public garden, the legendary Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA, closed when the pandemic struck. Wanting to connect with gardeners during that time, the garden began offering online classes. “After a year we had a pretty good idea of what people were interested in as well as what they needed to know—but maybe didn’t know that they needed to know,” explain Cricket Riley and Alice Kitajima, two of the book’s coauthors. In March 2021, Riley and Kitajima helped the Ruth Bancroft Garden launch their Dry Garden Design Certificate Program, which hundreds of gardeners have since completed. Now, Designing the Lush Dry Garden is meant to bring the ideas taught in this course and the deep institutional knowledge of the Ruth Bancroft Garden to an even wider audience.
Photography by Caitlin Atkinson for Designing the Lush Dry Garden.
Above: The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA. This is what the authors mean by a “lush dry garden.”
So who is this book for? Fellow Gardenista contributor Kier Homes, the third coauthor of the book, tells me, “It’s for gardeners curious about switching or tweaking the way they currently garden to an approach that is more water-conscious, sustainable, resilient, and in-sync with their climate.” Riley adds the book was written with both the novice and experienced gardener in mind. The lessons in the first part of the book lay out the basic steps to design a low-water garden, but “we also provide extensive lists of dependable, low-water plants that many people experienced in the field might not know about,” she notes. (The favorite plant lists alone might be worth the cover price.)
Above: Aloe ‘Creamsicle’ in full bloom under a mature Aloe ‘Hercules’ in the Ruth Bancroft Garden.
Designing the Lush Dry Garden is more than an instruction manual, though: It is a font of visual inspiration as well. In the second half of the book, the authors and photographer Caitlin Atkinson (who also shot all the images for the upcoming Gardenista: The Low-Impact Garden) take readers on tours of 17 inspiring home gardens. The photographs are stunning and the generous number of gardens is satisfying. “One of the beautiful things about the book is that it takes Ruth’s vision and shows readers many different ways it can be expressed,” says Riley. “All the gardens featured in the book were inspired by the Ruth Bancroft Garden, but they are all very different from Ruth’s garden—and each other.”
Above: A meandering path through cacti and agaves was Ruth’s original entrance into the dry garden.
Fans of the Ruth Bancroft Garden may be wondering how this new book differs from The Bold Dry Garden, published 2021. The earlier book told the story of Ruth and her garden; Designing the Lush Dry Garden translates all of Bancroft and the garden staff’s horticultural knowledge and design lessons into actionable advice for the home gardener.
Above: In the garden of designer Walker Young (who was once a volunteer at the Ruth Bancroft Garden), a shaggy Aloe thraskii accompanies Encephalartos lehmannii ‘Kirkwood’ and wispy Xanthorrhoea preissii.
“Visitors to the Ruth Bancroft Garden always want to know how to create a climate-appropriate garden themselves. We wrote Designing the Lush Dry Garden to give them the information and inspiration they needed to take Ruth’s vision out into their hands and out into the world,” says Riley. “We hope people take this book and use it to create more sustainable gardens. Just like Ruth did,” adds Homes.
Above: The coauthors.
