What they are
A handful of aromatic woody plants from the maquis and garrigue. Rosemary, lavender, sage, cistus, oleander.
They all evolved on the same patchy hillsides around the Mediterranean basin. Thin rocky soils. 500 mm of rain a year, most of it between October and March. Six months of sun and no rain in summer. Whatever survives that has to be tough, oily, and frugal.
These shrubs are the backbone of any dry garden. Plant them right and they outlive your fences.
Why they work
The leaves tell the story. Narrow, leathery, silvered, or hairy. Some roll their edges to shrink the surface that loses water. Others coat themselves in volatile oils that cool the leaf and discourage browsing in one move. Crush a rosemary needle in summer heat and you smell the strategy.
Roots run deep and wide. A mature rosemary will pull moisture from two meters down. Lavender sends a taproot through cracks in limestone that nothing else can use. Cistus colonises burned ground within a year, holding slopes that would otherwise wash.
The numbers stack up. Mature rosemary lives 20 years and beyond. Lavender gives you about 10 good years before it goes woody. Garden sage runs 5 to 8 years and then wants replacing. Oleander, planted right, becomes a small tree your grandchildren inherit.
All of them flower hard and feed pollinators in months when nothing else is blooming. A lavender hedge in July hums loud enough to hear from across the garden.
Build the bed
Two things are non-negotiable. Full sun and sharp drainage. Get either wrong and you bury the plant inside two seasons.
Site. South or west aspect. Six hours of direct sun minimum. No standing water, ever. If your soil holds a puddle for more than an hour after rain, build a mound or raise the bed 30 cm.
Drainage. Cut clay or loam with at least 30 percent grit. Crushed limestone, coarse sand, pumice, decomposed granite. The goal is a bed that drains within minutes. On heavy ground I plant on 40 cm mounds of pure rubble and gravel topped with 10 cm of native soil. The roots find their way down.
Spacing. Lavender at 60 to 80 cm centres. Rosemary at 1 m for upright varieties, 1.5 m for prostrate forms. Cistus at 1 to 1.5 m, since they sprawl. Oleander as a screen at 2 m. They want air between them. Crowding traps humidity and rots the crowns.
Skip the heavy mulch. A thick organic layer keeps the crown damp and kills the plant from the base up. Use a 5 cm layer of gravel or crushed stone instead. It suppresses weeds, reflects heat, and lets the crown breathe.
Tend them
Water deeply the first summer, then back off hard. A new lavender wants 5 litres twice a week for the first eight weeks. By the second year, once a month in a dry spell is plenty. By year three, nothing. See deep watering for the technique.
Never fertilise. These plants evolved on poor ground and rich soil makes them floppy, short-lived, and prone to fungal collapse. No manure, no compost, no liquid feed.
Pruning is what keeps them alive past their nominal lifespan.
Lavender. Right after flowering, cut back hard into green wood. Leave 5 cm of fresh growth above the woody base. Never cut into bare wood. It will not regrow from old stems. Skip a year of pruning and the plant goes leggy, splits at the centre, and dies.
Rosemary. Trim by a third every spring. Take off any branch over three years old, since it will not produce well. Upright forms can be hedged. Prostrate forms get a haircut on the windward side.
Sage. Cut back by half in early spring. Pinch tips through the summer to keep it dense.
Cistus. Light shaping after flowering. Do not cut into old wood, ever. Cistus will not regrow from a bare stem. When it gets ragged, replace it.
Oleander. Hard prune in late winter. It tolerates a chainsaw and comes back thick. Every part of the plant is toxic. Wear gloves, do not burn the trimmings (the smoke is poisonous), and keep them out of the compost.
When it goes wrong
The lavender died in its second winter. Soaked roots, not cold. Drainage failed. Dig out, raise the bed, replant.
The rosemary is half brown. Either crown rot from wet mulch or a hard frost on poorly sited plants. Cut to clean wood. If less than half the canopy is green, replace it.
The sage went woody at three years. Normal. Cut back hard in spring. If it does not break new growth in six weeks, take cuttings from the tips and start a replacement. See propagation.
The cistus split open in the middle. Snow load or hard pruning into old wood. There is no recovery. Plant a new one.
The oleander has yellow leaves and sooty mould. Scale or mealybugs underneath. Hose them off. Repeat weekly for a month. See mealybugs and scale.
The deeper lesson is in the ecosystem they come from. Garrigue is open, stony, aromatic, fire-shaped. Try to grow it as a lush border and it dies. Treat the bed like a south-facing limestone slope and you will not have to do much else. Masanobu Fukuoka would have said the same about any plant. Read the ground first, then plant what already wants to be there.