In July 2025, Hong Kong recorded its hottest day in 140 years. The thermometer at the Observatory hit 36.6°C, and for forty-seven consecutive nights, the minimum temperature refused to dip below 28°C. Your garden noticed. The hydrangeas collapsed by 10am. The lawn — if you were still clinging to one — turned the colour of a manila envelope. The roses produced flowers the size of bottle caps before giving up entirely. And somewhere in the New Territories, a gardener named Arthur Chan looked at his three-metre Agave americana — unfazed, unwatered, architecturally magnificent — and thought: this is the future.
He’s right. The garden we inherited — the colonial fantasy of English herbaceous borders transplanted to 22° north of the equator — was always an act of horticultural denial. We’ve been pouring water onto a lie for a hundred and fifty years. The dry garden isn’t a stylistic choice. It’s not a trend. It’s a recognition that Hong Kong’s climate has shifted, and our gardens need to shift with it. The good news is that the alternative — a garden built around plants that actively prefer heat, drought, and the particular quality of light we get here — is more interesting than anything we’re leaving behind.
The New Climate Reality: Why Your Garden Is Already Changing
Let’s be precise about what we’re dealing with. Hong Kong has always been subtropical — hot summers, mild winters, a monsoon that delivers eighty percent of annual rainfall between May and September. What’s changed isn’t the basic pattern. It’s the volatility within it.
The data, from the Hong Kong Observatory’s own records, tells the story. Between 1885 and 2025, the number of “very hot days” — days where the maximum temperature exceeds 33°C — has tripled. The number of “hot nights” — where the minimum stays above 28°C — has increased tenfold. But the rainfall data is more instructive for gardeners. Annual totals haven’t changed much. What’s changed is distribution: longer dry spells punctuated by more intense downpours. In 2023, a single hour in September delivered 158 millimetres of rain — roughly a quarter of London’s annual total — onto soil that had been baking for three weeks. Most garden plants can’t handle both extremes. They evolved for one or the other, not both in the same month.
This is the problem the Mediterranean climate gardening movement has been solving for decades — just for a different set of parameters. Olivier Filippi, the French nurseryman whose book The Dry Gardening Handbook should be required reading for every Hong Kong gardener, has spent thirty years cataloguing plants from the world’s five Mediterranean climate zones. His insight — which sounds obvious once you hear it — is that plants from regions with wet winters and dry summers have evolved strategies that our summer-wet, winter-dry natives never needed. The overlap with Hong Kong isn’t perfect, but it’s closer than anything from northern Europe.
The practical consequence for your garden: the plants that will thrive here in 2036 are already the plants that are thriving now, in 2026, if you’ve been paying attention. Walk through the Botanical Gardens in mid-August and notice which specimens look untroubled. It won’t be the hydrangeas. It’ll be the yuccas, the agaves, the strelitzias, the bougainvillea — plants that come from places where surviving August isn’t an achievement, it’s just Tuesday.
The Mediterranean Playbook: What Translates and What Doesn’t
The Mediterranean garden aesthetic — gravel, terracotta, silvery foliage, the scent of lavender and rosemary on warm air — is seductive precisely because it looks effortless. But importing it wholesale to Hong Kong requires editing. The Mediterranean has a genuine winter — cold enough to vernalise tulips, kill tropical weeds, and give plants a proper dormant period. We don’t have that. Our winter is their spring. This matters.
Take lavender. Every Hong Kong gardener has killed lavender. It’s practically a rite of passage. The problem isn’t heat — lavender handles 40°C in Provence. It’s the combination of heat and humidity. Lavandula angustifolia (English lavender) rots at the crown in our summer. Lavandula stoechas (French lavender) lasts a season, maybe two, before succumbing. The variety that actually works here is Lavandula dentata (French or fringed lavender), which has a lighter, more camphoraceous scent and significantly better humidity tolerance. Even then, it needs the sharpest drainage you can provide — think fifty percent grit in the planting hole — and a position where air moves freely around the foliage. Arthur Chan grows his in unglazed terracotta pots raised on pot feet, and replaces the plants every three years. He considers this realistic, not pessimistic.
Rosemary is similarly temperamental in our humidity, but there’s a workaround worth knowing. Rosmarinus officinalis ‘Prostratus’ — the trailing form — handles Hong Kong summers far better than the upright varieties. It’s less susceptible to powdery mildew, and when it does get leggy (which it will, after about eighteen months), it roots from cuttings with almost insulting ease. Chan propagates replacements every spring and treats the mother plant as expendable. This is the Mediterranean gardener’s mindset: plants are not permanent. They’re managed.
The plants that transfer most successfully are the structural ones. Olea europaea (olive) grows well here if you can find a specimen that wasn’t tortured into a topiary shape in a Dutch greenhouse — look for trees with a genuine trunk, not a braided stem, and expect slow growth. Cupressus sempervirens ‘Totem’ gives you the Italian cypress silhouette without the eventual 20-metre height. Pistacia lentiscus (mastic tree) is practically unkillable and has the added virtue of smelling like a Greek hillside when you brush against it. What doesn’t work: Cistus (rock rose) — too humid. Santolina (cotton lavender) — rots at the base. Most Artemisia species — A. ‘Powis Castle’ is the exception, and even that needs a gravel mulch and zero overhead watering.
The Australian Contingent: Plants That Laugh at Our Summers
If Mediterranean plants need careful selection, Australian natives need almost none. Western Australia has a climate that maps onto Hong Kong’s with surprising fidelity — wet winters, long dry summers, intense light. The plants that evolved there come pre-adapted to exactly the conditions that kill European imports. The problem is supply. Most Hong Kong nurseries don’t stock Australian natives. The ones that do — notably the specialist growers who supply the Flower Market on Prince Edward Road West — tend to carry the same half-dozen species. Here’s what to ask for.
Grevillea is the genus to build around. The hybrids developed for the cut-flower trade — ‘Robyn Gordon’, ‘Superb’, ‘Moonlight’ — are compact, long-flowering, and almost completely indifferent to neglect. They want full sun, acid soil (Hong Kong’s native soil is acid — one of the few things working in our favour), and no phosphorus. This last point is critical and widely misunderstood. Australian Proteaceae — grevilleas, banksias, hakeas — have evolved in phosphorus-poor soils and will develop iron chlorosis and die if you feed them a standard NPK fertiliser. Use a fertiliser formulated for Australian natives, or better still, don’t fertilise them at all. Arthur Chan’s grevilleas haven’t been fed in five years and flower continuously from March to November.
Callistemon (bottlebrush) is more forgiving. C. viminalis ‘Little John’ stays under a metre, produces crimson brushes throughout the wet season, and will grow in heavy clay — which is what most Hong Kong gardens sit on, beneath whatever topsoil was imported. Westringia fruticosa (coastal rosemary) is the most useful hedging plant nobody in Hong Kong grows — it handles salt spray, wind, and drought, forms a dense grey-green mound to about a metre and a half, and produces small white flowers that native bees work obsessively. It can be clipped as tightly as box and looks better for it.
The eucalypts are a more complicated proposition. Eucalyptus species grow fast, drop limbs, and have aggressive root systems that will find your drainage pipes. In a typical Hong Kong garden of forty square metres, a eucalyptus is a liability. But there are smaller forms worth considering: Eucalyptus pulverulenta ‘Baby Blue’ is grown for its circular juvenile foliage (excellent for cutting), stays shrub-sized with annual coppicing, and provides that unmistakable eucalyptus scent every time you brush past. Eucalyptus citriodora (lemon-scented gum) can be managed as a pollarded specimen if you’re committed to the maintenance. The rule: if you can’t see the top of a mature specimen from your window, it’s too big for your garden.
Soil and Drainage: The Foundation Nobody Wants to Talk About
Every garden book ever written tells you to improve your soil. Few tell you what that actually means in Hong Kong, where “soil” is frequently subsoil — the compacted, clay-heavy, biologically dead material left behind after construction. It’s the colour of rust, it sets like brick in the dry season, and it holds water like a swimming pool in the wet season. Plants drown in it during August and desiccate on it during November. If you do nothing else before planting a dry garden, fix the drainage.
The standard advice — “dig in organic matter” — is only half right. Organic matter improves soil structure, yes, but in Hong Kong’s climate it decomposes at an accelerated rate. The compost you dig in this September will be largely gone by next September, and the soil will slump back to its compacted state. For a dry garden, which depends on sharp drainage, the better approach is a permanent structural amendment: grit. Horticultural grit, crushed granite, expanded shale — the material matters less than the particle size. You want something between 4mm and 10mm, incorporated at a ratio of one part grit to two parts existing soil, to a depth of at least thirty centimetres. This doesn’t decompose. It creates permanent air spaces in the soil profile, which is what roots actually need — not nutrients, not organic matter, but oxygen at the root tips.
For container gardening, which is the reality for most Hong Kong gardeners, the standard potting mix is actively harmful for dry-garden plants. Commercial potting mixes are designed to hold water — exactly what a succulent or a Mediterranean shrub doesn’t want. Make your own: two parts coarse sand or fine gravel, one part good-quality loam (not potting compost — actual soil-based loam, which you can get from the larger nurseries in Fanling), one part horticultural grit. Add a handful of horticultural charcoal to keep the mix sweet. This drains instantly, resists compaction, and supports the mycorrhizal fungi that dry-climate plants depend on. Water it in well when you first plant, then leave it alone.
One more thing about containers: the colour matters. Black plastic pots absorb heat, and in full Hong Kong sun, the soil temperature inside can reach 50°C — lethal to root systems that evolved for the insulating properties of rocky ground. Use terracotta, glazed ceramic in light colours, or at minimum, double-pot black nursery containers inside something reflective. Arthur Chan paints his plastic pots with diluted white masonry paint. It’s ugly up close but his Agave parryi doesn’t care about aesthetics, just root temperature.
The Plant List: Twenty Species for a Hong Kong Dry Garden
This is not an exhaustive list. It’s a working palette — plants that are available in Hong Kong (with some hunting), that have proven themselves over multiple summers, and that look good together. The categories overlap deliberately — a garden of only succulents looks like a garden centre display. The goal is the illusion of naturalism, which requires mixing forms.
Architectural anchors (the plants that give a garden its bones): Agave americana and its smaller cultivar ‘Mediopicta Alba’ — the latter has a cream central stripe and reaches only 60cm across, making it viable for containers. Agave attenuata (foxtail agave) is the spineless, friendlier-looking cousin that handles partial shade. Yucca gloriosa ‘Variegata’ — slow, architectural, and the variegation brightens shady corners. Dasylirion longissimum (Mexican grass tree) — a sphere of needle-thin leaves on a slowly elongating trunk; absurdly sculptural and completely indifferent to weather. Strelitzia reginae (bird of paradise) — ubiquitous for good reason. Strelitzia nicolai — for scale; it will reach four metres and look like it belongs outside a modernist villa in Cape Town.
Mid-height structure (the plants that fill the space between anchors and ground): Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii — chartreuse flower heads in late winter, blue-grey foliage year-round. Wear gloves when cutting; the sap is an irritant. Phormium cultivars — ‘Bronze Baby’ for dark foliage, ‘Yellow Wave’ for variegation. They handle wet feet better than most dry-garden plants, which makes them useful in transition zones. Anigozanthos (kangaroo paw) — ‘Bush Pearl’ and ‘Bush Diamond’ are compact hybrids that flower for months. The trick is removing spent flower stems at the base, not just deadheading. Salvia officinalis (culinary sage) — not just for cooking; the purple-leaved form ‘Purpurascens’ is one of the best foliage plants for a gravel garden.
Ground layer (plants that cover soil, suppress weeds, and soften hard edges): Sedum mexicanum — a lime-green carpeter that takes foot traffic. Dymondia margaretae (silver carpet) — the best lawn substitute for a dry garden, though it needs full sun to stay tight. Thymus vulgaris — dies back in summer humidity but returns in autumn; plant it where you’ll brush against it. Echeveria elegans — the classic Mexican hen-and-chicks, which will colonise cracks in a stone wall if you let it. Senecio mandraliscae (blue chalk sticks) — the colour of a swimming pool in a David Hockney painting.
Grasses (the element that makes a dry garden look like a garden, not a rockery): Muhlenbergia capillaris (pink muhly grass) — produces a cloud of pink inflorescences in autumn that catches low-angle light. Pennisetum setaceum ‘Rubrum’ (purple fountain grass) — treat it as an annual; it rarely overwinters here but earns its keep in a single season. Nassella tenuissima (Mexican feather grass) — the most photogenic grass in existence, and it self-seeds with enthusiasm. Deadhead before the seed ripens unless you want it everywhere.
What’s deliberately absent: cacti. Hong Kong’s wet season is too wet for most desert cacti unless they’re under cover. A single week of daily afternoon thunderstorms will split a Ferocactus like an overripe tomato. If you must have cacti, grow them in unglazed terracotta under a clear polycarbonate roof. Otherwise, stick to succulents with some humidity tolerance — agaves, aloes, and echeverias are more forgiving than you think.
Water: The Counter-Intuitive Truth About Dry-Climate Plants
The most common way to kill a drought-tolerant plant is to water it. This sounds like a paradox but it’s the single most frequent cause of death in Hong Kong dry gardens, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it determines everything about how you irrigate.
Plants from seasonally dry climates have evolved two strategies for surviving drought, and they’re mutually exclusive. The first is avoidance — the plant shuts down, drops leaves, and enters a state of suspended animation until water returns. The second is tolerance — the plant continues to function but uses physiological mechanisms (deep roots, water-storing tissue, reflective leaf surfaces) to manage the deficit. When a drought-avoiding plant receives water during its dormant period — which, for many Mediterranean species, is our hot, wet summer — it interprets the moisture as a signal to break dormancy. It starts growing. Then the inevitable dry spell arrives, catches the plant in an active state it can’t sustain, and kills it. You’ve essentially tricked the plant into suicide.
This is why summer watering of established dry-garden plants should be zero. Not reduced — zero. If a plant has been in the ground for more than one full growing season and it’s a genuine dry-climate species, it should not receive supplementary water between June and September. The exception is plants in containers, which have a limited root volume and will need water during extended dry spells — but even then, water in the early morning (before 7am) so the foliage is dry by midday, and water the soil, not the leaves. Overhead watering in humidity is an invitation to fungal disease.
The corollary is that establishment watering is genuinely critical, and most gardeners get it wrong in the opposite direction — they overwater. A new dry-garden plant needs deep, infrequent watering to encourage roots to grow downward in search of moisture. The protocol that works in Hong Kong: water thoroughly at planting, then not again for at least a week. After that, water only when the soil is dry at a depth of five centimetres — use your finger, not a schedule. After three months, begin extending the interval. By six months, the plant should be on its own. If it can’t manage that, it’s the wrong plant for the spot, and replacing it is cheaper than a lifetime of watering.
A final note on water quality: Hong Kong’s tap water is soft, slightly acidic, and perfectly fine for garden use. The chlorine dissipates within hours if you fill a watering can and leave it standing. There is no need for rainwater harvesting, distilled water, or any of the other esoterica that garden forums recommend. The plants we’re discussing evolved in places where water is far more precious and far less clean than what comes out of a Hong Kong tap.
Maintenance: What a Dry Garden Actually Demands
The promise of the dry garden is low maintenance. The reality is different. A well-designed dry garden is low-water and low-input, but it is not low-attention. The maintenance it requires is specific, seasonal, and unforgiving of neglect. Skip a season and you don’t get a slightly overgrown garden — you get a garden where the wrong plants have won.
Winter (December–February): the critical window. This is when you cut back. Herbaceous perennials that have finished flowering — Euphorbia, Salvia, Artemisia — should be cut to within ten centimetres of the ground. Not to five centimetres, and not to fifteen — ten centimetres leaves enough basal growth to protect the crown from the occasional cold snap while removing the season’s exhausted top growth. Grasses get cut back in late February, just before new growth begins. Muhlenbergia to fifteen centimetres, Pennisetum to ten. Burn or bin the cuttings; don’t compost them. Dry-climate plants are susceptible to crown rot, and leaving debris around the base is an invitation.
Spring (March–May): the mulching moment. Apply a gravel mulch — not bark, not cocoa shells, not anything organic. A 2-3cm layer of 6-10mm gravel suppresses weeds, reflects heat away from the soil surface, and prevents the soil from capping (forming a hard crust) after heavy rain. It also looks right — which matters more than purists admit. A dry garden with bark mulch looks like a mistake. A dry garden with gravel mulch looks intentional.
Summer (June–September): do almost nothing. Seriously. This is the season when most gardeners, confronted with a garden that looks static, feel compelled to do something — water, fertilise, prune, fuss. Resist. The plants are not static; they’re managing. If a leaf yellows, leave it. If a plant looks tired, trust that it knows what it’s doing. The only essential summer task is weeding — and in a gravel-mulched garden, weeding takes five minutes a week because seeds can’t germinate in mineral mulch the way they can in soil.
Autumn (October–November): planting time. This is when you add new plants. The soil is still warm from summer, the air temperature is dropping, and the wet season is tapering off — perfect conditions for root establishment without the stress of summer heat. Autumn-planted specimens have six months to establish before the following summer, which is the difference between a plant that thrives and one that merely survives. Arthur Chan does all his planting in the first two weeks of October and considers any other timing an unnecessary gamble.
The secret nobody tells you: a dry garden’s maintenance calendar is more rigid than a conventional garden’s. You can neglect a shrub border for a year and it will look shaggy but survive. Neglect a dry garden’s winter cutback and by the following autumn the euphorbias have collapsed into the agaves, the grasses have smothered the sedums, and the whole composition has lost its structure. The lower the water input, the more disciplined the maintenance must be. This isn’t a contradiction — it’s the trade-off.
The Garden That Belongs Here
There is a garden in Fanling that I think about constantly. It occupies a plot of roughly ninety square metres — the footprint of a generous village house garden — and was designed eight years ago by a landscape architect named Rachel Tsang, who trained at the University of Sheffield and returned to Hong Kong determined to stop planting roses. The garden has no lawn. It has no irrigation system. It has no plants that require staking, spraying, or apologising for. It contains forty-seven species, all of them from climates with a dry season, and it looks better in August than most Hong Kong gardens look in March.
Tsang’s insight, which took her three years of failures to arrive at, was that a dry garden in Hong Kong shouldn’t look like Provence. It shouldn’t look like Santa Fe or Melbourne or any of the other places whose gardens fill the books we import. It should look like Hong Kong — which means accepting the humidity, the sudden downpours, the quality of light that shifts from silver to gold to grey in a single afternoon. Her garden uses Mediterranean and Australian plants as materials, not as a style. The structure is Cantonese: a sequence of defined outdoor rooms connected by a single path, each with a focal plant where a European garden would put a statue. The aesthetic restraint is local too — Hong Kong maximalism, the instinct to fill every square metre with something, is the hardest habit to break. Tsang’s garden is sixty percent empty space. The gravel between the plants isn’t dead ground. It’s breathing room.
This is where the dry garden conversation should end up: not with a plant list, but with a question about what a Hong Kong garden looks like when it stops trying to be somewhere else. The plants from the world’s dry places — from the maquis of Corsica, the fynbos of the Cape, the kwongan of Western Australia — thrive here because they recognise the conditions. It’s up to us to recognise that this convergence isn’t a coincidence. It’s an opportunity. The garden we’ve been failing to grow for a century and a half is waiting for us to try something that actually works.
