Drought changing gardeners' strategies

All the signs indicate that we are in for another hot, dry summer. The first few weeks of June were reminiscent of an August dry spell, the grass beginning to turn tan and dry, and the motionless air choked with pollen.

There is nothing like a few days in the 90s to make you quickly forget what a lovely spring we have had. Some of us are catching on to the fact that we are going to have a lot more days full of heat and humidity and a lot fewer puffy clouds and gentle showers. Better to expect the worse and respond accordingly.

Cy Johnson, a resident of Clemmons, showed me how he had switched over from water-hungry geraniums and impatiens to cactus, succulents and tropicals in most of his container-plantings.

Johnson's yard is centered around a beautiful, blue-bottom swimming pool. The pool is raised on a mound and stands high in the landscape. He has surrounded the house and pool with screening plants and created a private oasis.

Johnson told me that a few years ago he gave up on the summer bedding schemes - geraniums, petunias and the like - and went with tropicals, cactus and succulents that he found in garden centers and big-box stores, mostly in the house-plant section. To Johnson's way of thinking, the drought changed everything.

"We couldn't go away for one weekend without coming home and the bedding plants being half dead," he said. So he decided he would try something new.

A few hardy bananas went into the ground around the pool. These grow to an amazing 10 feet in height within one season. A gorgeous pot houses a windmill palm, a kind that is perfectly hardy in our climate. Another pot features the long paddle-shaped leaves of a bird of paradise. Others have beautiful flowering hibiscus.

All of these are nice, but none hold a candle to two amazing feature plants: a ponytail palm that Johnson says he has had "since birth" and an incredible aloe plant that is easily 3 feet across, the largest I have seen.

The ponytail palm has a wide, onion-shaped base about twice the size of a basketball and ends in a fountain of grass-like leaves at the end of a small trunk. Johnson remembers when it was in a 6-inch pot.

You are by now wondering where all these massive tropicals go to spend the winter and how they get there.

"I have a bad back," Johnson said, "but all these plants make it to the garage every autumn."

The garage is quite a bit downhill from the pool. It stays in the upper 50s throughout the winter courtesy of a vent from the basement.

There is only one window, however, so Johnson has to stack furniture up around it to make an elevated space where the plants can get light.

He waters very infrequently in winter, about once every three weeks, and he uses no winter fertilizer.

Johnson also plants a lot of cactus and succulents. He said that the first year he tried it he lost a few to overwatering but has since learned that less is better when it comes to these plants.

He uses a prepackaged cactus potting mix to which he adds some sand for even greater drainage. The top 2 inches of soil surrounding the crown of the plant is replaced with river rock. This keeps moisture away from the crucial juncture of plant and soil.

Most of his cactus he has gathered from the racks at the big-box stores. On his deck, window boxes full of cactus line the railings. He stacks these window boxes one inside the other for extra insulation and said that they don't dry out as quick as a result. He drills extra drainage holes in his succulent pots to avoid excess moisture.

He has also filled some strawberry pots with hens and chicks and echeverias to great effect.

Many gardeners are responding to drought by choosing plants wisely and planting according to the needs of the plant. Succulents generally need their soil amended so that when we do experience periods of rain they are not sitting in sodden clay soil.

Many of these plants are a delight to experiment with. They seem to relish the heat and humidity and take the dry periods in stride.

If only we could learn to do that.

n If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening.

@wsjournal.com.