A gravel garden for a dry Shropshire slope

The brief was honest: a south-facing bank that baked every summer, thin soil over shale, and owners who wanted to spend their weekends in the garden rather than working on it. The lawn that came with the house had given up years before we arrived.

We stopped fighting the site and planted for it instead. The turf came off, the soil stayed exactly as poor as we found it, and the whole bank went under a deep blanket of local gravel. Into that went plants that relish a hard life: lavender and santolina, verbascum and eryngium, cistus against the warm wall, and drifts of stipa to move in the wind.

Poor soil turns out to be the secret. With no rich living to be had, everything grows lean, flowers hard and stands up without staking. The gravel keeps the crowns dry through a Shropshire winter — wet, not cold, is what kills these plants — and seedlings that do arrive pull out of it with two fingers.

Three summers on, it has never been watered, there is no mower in the shed, and the care visits take an hour where the old lawn took three. It is, by some distance, the easiest garden on our round — and in June, when the whole bank hums with bees, it might be the loveliest too.