No sentence is more closely bound up with Beth Chatto's gardening than Right Plant, Right Place. It is a simple rule with an attitude underneath it: plants should not be forced to grow where they do not want to live. Understand the conditions of a site first, then choose plants that can actually thrive there.
She proved it in her own garden. The Gravel Garden in Essex was laid out on dry, free-draining ground in one of the driest corners of Britain, and it has never been irrigated. The principle was not to adjust the site to suit the plants, but the plants to suit the site.
This summer put a question to that principle that Beth Chatto never had to answer. What happens when it is not only the plant that changes, but the place?
Right Plant, Right Place, Right Time.
— After Beth Chatto
At the last Beth Chatto Symposium in Colchester, held under the title Connections Through Time, the subject was the link between people, plants and gardens across time. It is that word, time, that seems to me to matter most for the way we will garden next.
We are used to asking what a site is like now. How heavy is the soil? How much sun does it get? Wet or dry? How cold does it get in winter? And then: which plants suit those conditions?
The question should really run further. What will this site be like in five years, or fifteen, or fifty?
A site is no longer a fixed quantity. Heat and drought change soils, water availability and soil microbiom. What counts as the right plant for a place today may be at its limit under the conditions of the 2040s. Which means the rule needs a third term: Right Plant, Right Place. And – Right Time. Or, put more plainly, the right plant for the future.
Garden-making has always learned from the past. The classic English garden took its cues from established pictures: herbaceous borders, lawn, hedges, trees. Then the thinking shifted. With naturalistic planting, the New Perennial movement and the Sheffield School, the question of which plants belong to a site moved to the front, and with the wild garden movement came the question of what those plants feed and shelter.
That was a decisive step. It is no longer quite enough, because the site itself is changing. A plant can be perfectly matched to a soil, a rainfall figure and a temperature range. What happens when summers turn hotter and drier, rain arrives in fewer and heavier bursts, and winters are wet and frost-free? The right plant for today may not be the right plant for tomorrow.
This leads somewhere uncomfortable. What does native mean when the climate of a place is changing?
There are good reasons to plant natives. They are part of ecosystems that already work, and they feed and shelter the animals that grew up alongside them. The trouble starts when a sound principle hardens into dogma, because nature has never been static.
Evolution is change. Species spread, populations shift their range, birds change where they spend the winter, plants find new ground. Climate zones do not stay inside the lines we have drawn for them on maps. When the climate moves, fauna and flora move with it.
So perhaps the question is no longer only: what was native here? It is also: what can live here under the conditions to come, and what part can it play in a system that works?
Olivier Filippi, who has spent decades working with plants for hot, dry climates, gave a talk in Colchester that made this concrete. We are not describing an abstract future. It has started.
Take the hoopoe. The bird traditionally winters south of the Sahara, yet birds now overwinter regularly around the Mediterranean, southern France included. Studies of European long-distance migrants show the same pattern: wintering grounds shifting north, migration routes growing shorter.
Filippi added his own observations. Hoopoes stay through the winter near his nursery and find food: the pupae of the pine processionary moth, a species spreading north as the climate warms. That is more than a dot moving on a distribution map. It is a bird changing its behaviour, not simply its address.
His second example was the monarch butterfly in Morocco. North American monarchs are famous for their migration between Canada and Mexico, and their caterpillars depend on milkweed (Asclepias). In Morocco, a milkweed species from South America has escaped from gardens and naturalised. Every now and then monarch butterflies are blown over the Atlantic Ocean with a storm and a couple of years ago some ended up in Morocco. The butterflies have taken to the milkweeds, propagated and formed a stable population. A species native to another continent has found a new living.
None of this should be romanticised. Not every species will adapt. Some – if not many – will go. Others, new ones, will arrive. But the examples make one thing clear: nature is not static. It reacts. It moves. It experiments. It finds ways. It adapts.
For gardens, the consequences are considerable. This summer showed that plants we had filed under tough and drought-proof can fail under extremes. Bergenias and catmints reached their limits. So, in places, did the specialists for heat and drought: phlomis, yucca and aloe, scorched by unusual heat and a drought that would not end.
That is worth holding on to. Drought tolerance is not an absolute property. It depends on the soil, its preparation before planting, on how long the drought lasts, on temperature and humidity, on how deep the roots have gone, and on the combination of all of them. A plant that walks through an ordinary dry summer is not necessarily equipped for the next extreme.
We need to look more closely. And we need to widen the field.
There is no reason to be purely gloomy about this. Regions already exist whose conditions match what many of our gardens are only now moving towards. They grow plants that handle heat, drought and long rainless spells. We need not (and should not) copy those plantings one to one. But we can learn from them: understand the strategies, and test which species and which plant communities might work under the conditions we are heading into.
This is not about an exotic palette. It is about resilience: plantings that still hold together when the weather stops matching our expectations. And perhaps our idea of native has to develop along with them. Not as a licence to swap species at will, but with an eye on what is actually happening ecologically. When climates and habitats shift, plants and animals shift their ranges with them.
The most useful thing I brought home from the symposium, and from Filippi's talk, was not a plant list. It was a stance. We could afford to trust nature a little more again.
Not every change is a disaster from the outset. Climate change will put many species under pressure and drive some to extinction, and that should be neither played down nor dressed up. But nature is not a fixed system that we can only preserve unchanged. It has been changing for millions of years. Evolution is change.
Our work as gardeners will increasingly be to allow change rather than hold a past state in place at any cost. That does not mean planting anything at all. It means watching more closely, experimenting, and learning from the regions that already live with what is coming for us.
Perhaps that is the honest modern extension of Beth Chatto's great principle. Not only Right Plant, Right Place, but the right plant for what comes next. Because the question for the garden of tomorrow is no longer only: what grows here today? It is: what will still be able to grow here?
Take that question seriously and there is reason for confidence. Even in a changing world, gardens can stay rich, beautiful and full of life: places that give people rest and, at the same time, shelter plants and animals. We only have to be willing to move with the change.
