The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and practices for a changing climate. Olivier Filippi, 2019
Filippi, O. (2019) The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and practices for a changing climate. London, Filbert Press.
The Dry Gardening Handbook reflects more than twenty years of practice by Olivier Filippi and his wife Clara on gardening with draught-adapted plants, serving as a guide for other gardeners on how to understand plant’s physiology and adaptative strategies to climate and soil conditions, and how to integrate this knowledge in the design of a garden that requires minimum resources and management.
Filippi introduces the Gaussen diagram as a tool to visualize the role of draught in a place based on it’s 10 years average data of monthly temperature and precipitation and thus to understand which plant species could be more adapted to that climate conditions. However, this diagram should be taken as a general first approach to the characteristics of the site, where factors as orientation, topography, composition and depth of the soil and plant competition for resources will determine the actual hydric deficit.
