Preparing Your Garden for the Heat 🥵

Brace yourselves! Who else can feel the sweltering heat coming? We haven’t hit the peaks of summer heat obviously, but it’s certainly right around the corner. Now is the time to shore up your landscape’s resilience, so today we’ve got a few tips to help you along…

Try to the water the base of the plant! While some of this water certainly is reaching the roots, it has to take a bit of a roadtrip…

Plant Like A Forest

We’ve all felt it before… walking into the forest on a hot summer day and feeling the temperature drop like a bowling ball. Just as forests self-regulate, your landscape can too, by using vertical layering. Use taller plants or structures like a trellis to cast shade over more tender companions. Here’s some of our favorite understory options for vertical layering and lowering ambient temperatures:

• Redbud - A small, native tree that leafs out early and casts gentle shade, ideal for cooling more delicate plants below.
• Elderberry - Super fast-growing, spreading, and creates quick summer shade.
• Serviceberry - Maybe our most planted understory tree. Early blooms, summer fruit, and great fall color.
• Dogwood - Dogwoods tend to want a bit more shade in Atlanta these days so they’re great for vertical layering up against some overstory trees.
• Beautyberry - Arching stems provide partial shade in summer, while clusters of bright purple berries offer visual appeal and food for birds in fall.
• Pawpaw - Large tropical-looking leaves that cast broad shade. It thrives in part shade and produces custard-like fruit when mature.

Heat is bad enough, and wind can actually make it worse. Wind removes humidity around leaf surfaces, encouraging more water vapor to leave the plant (also called transpiration). So, by planting a windbreak or a barrier to reduce wind speed, you can promote water retention for your down-wind plants. Here are some good options for windbreaks:

• Florida Anise - We plant these constantly and they offer great evergreen, year-round protection from wind and sun.
• Pineapple Guava - Evergreen with thick, silvery foliage that reflects heat and provides year-round shade.
• Florida Doghobble - Dense, evergreen foliage cools the soil and helps stabilize slopes with its spreading root system. 

If you’ve got forest edge on your property we highly recommend pawpaws! They thrive in dappled shade, support native wildlife, and reward you with uniquely tropical-tasting fruit come late summer.

Strategic Watering

When you water, make it count! Deep watering encourages roots to grow down, where soil stays cooler and wetter. So, opt for a semi-frequent deep, deep watering rather than a super frequent sprinkle. It will promote strong root establishment and resilience. Watering early in the morning minimizes evaporation and helps plants face the day fully hydrated. Make sure to water the base of the plant as best you can rather than the leaves.

You can also group plants with similar water needs together (a permaculture practice known as hydrozoning). This way, you’re not overwatering drought-tolerant species or underwatering thirsty ones.

So, for example:

• A grouping of drought-tolerant plants like purple coneflower, yarrow, little bluestem, and lavender. These thrive in hot, dry conditions with minimal supplemental watering once established.
• A grouping of your moisture-loving plants like cardinal flower, rush grass, Joe pye weed, swamp milkweed, and elderberry together in low-lying or more-regularly irrigated spots.

Black-eyed Susan and Liatris make great partners for hydrozoning! They’ll appreciate water their first season in the ground but can stick up to tough droughts once established.