Less is more in the garden too

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Pictured above: Garden in Gloucestershire by Daniel Combes Garden. Photography: Britt Willoughby

By Sam Peters, Co-founder Planted

The saying “less is more” was coined by German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who made it a guiding principle for minimalist, modern design. He believed that by stripping structures back to their simplest, most functional form and eliminating unnecessary ornamentation, a building’s truest beauty would be revealed.

While architecture embraced these principles, 20th-century gardening in the western world took a starkly different route. Here, “more is more” might be a more fitting motto.

Gardeners have long been bombarded with messages telling them they need more:

More machines, more mulch, more pesticides, herbicides, pots, plants, and garden furniture. More blowers, strimmers, ride-on mowers. You name it. The message has been: buy more to take control of your garden and impose order.

But many of these machines and chemicals disrupt natural processes, damage ecosystems, and degrade biodiversity. Often, they’re designed to remove organic matter and sanitise outdoor spaces. Even when that’s not their explicit purpose, it’s the result. In just a few seasons, much of this equipment ends up broken, unused, or dumped, sometimes leaching into the soil it once ‘helped’ maintain.

All the while, the environment suffers. Biodiversity shrinks. The climate heats up.

But times are changing. In recent times, more and more gardeners have embraced a new approach. They're reimagining garden beauty, recognising that it can come from simplicity, ecological resilience, and a reduced reliance on chemical or artificial inputs. In essence, they’re applying Van der Rohe’s philosophy of “less is more” to the soil under their feet.

Pictured above: Garden in Gloucestershire by Daniel Combes Garden. Photography: Britt Willoughby

“The process of garden making can be very destructive,” explains garden designer Daniel Combes. “We change conditions to suit our plants, import materials from everywhere, without understanding the consequences.

“Biodiversity thrives on scarcity, not abundance. Gardening has often been about excess. Bigger plants, more fertiliser. But minimal intervention actually produces leaner, more resilient plants.”

Combes is part of a growing movement of designers rethinking traditional approaches in the face of climate change and biodiversity collapse. They’re encouraging practices that place ecological systems and native species at the heart of garden design.

Instead of grabbing the nearest blousy, chemically enhanced import from the local garden centre, a plant unlikely to survive without ongoing support, these gardeners are choosing hardier, regionally appropriate species.   

Many traditional ‘favourites’ now struggle under the increasingly erratic weather patterns we’ve seen in recent decades. As any observant gardener or farmer can tell you, the dependable climate of old is gone. In the UK we now routinely experience average temperatures more historically associated with the south of France. And that trend is set to continue.

Darryl Moore, landscape designer and author of Gardening in a Changing World, agrees that fewer inputs can lead to more meaningful connections with the natural world.

“Gardens are a cultural artefact and a way we mediate our relationship with other species,” Moore explains. “But the way we’ve gardened over the last hundred years has been devastating for biodiversity.

“Think of the ‘unholy trinity’: peat, pesticides, and plastic pots. None of them are good for the environment.

“Gardening is an ecological simplification. We create planted areas that don’t function like natural ecosystems. We need to stop using plants and start forming relationships with them. A kind of kinship. We are totally dependent on plants, from the oxygen we breathe to the food we eat.”

Meanwhile, gardeners across Europe are feeling the effects of climate breakdown first-hand. Summers bring longer droughts and hotter temperatures, while floods and storms are more intense. Forecasts suggest the world could warm by up to 5°C in the next 45 years. As a result, harvests are failing and previously dependable garden species are struggling to survive.

In response, many are turning to plants native to warmer climates, which are better suited to endure heat and drought.

Climate-tolerant ‘Mediterranean’ plants include succulents, herbs like rosemary and thyme, hardy native perennials such as coneflower and yarrow, and resilient shrubs like lavender or hardy ice plants. Selecting species with high drought tolerance, introducing natural ponds, streams and irrigation which can mitigate flood risk, and prioritising native or well-adapted plants all help create sustainable future-proofed gardens.

Pictured above Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden in Essex

A celebrated example of drought-tolerant planting can be found in Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden in Essex. Once a car park, it was originally planted by Chatto and her team as an experiment to test a wide range of drought-tolerant species. The garden is famous for never being watered, despite sitting in one of the driest parts of the country and having naturally free-draining soil—a testament to how resilient, well-chosen plants can thrive under challenging conditions.

Daniel Combes’ recently completed project in the Cotswolds demonstrates a thoughtful, climate-resilient approach to garden design. Working with the materials already on site, including crushed stone from the build, his team created a robust and sustainable landscape that embraces both drought and flood conditions. This garden is a celebration of resilient planting: lavender, rosemary, and other Mediterranean species thrive here, bringing structure, scent, and seasonal colour while reducing the need for irrigation. Their deep roots and permeable surfaces help manage water flow naturally, demonstrating how careful design can balance beauty and flood resilience.

Another project currently in progress in Dorset reimagines a historic landscape by restoring the site’s natural hydrology. Combes and his team identified the original course of a stream that once flowed through the property and developed a design to reconnect it to its natural floodplain. The reinstated watercourse, reflected in the design’s coloured swathes of grass, marks the natural path of the river and celebrates the dynamic relationship between garden and water.  

Pictured above: Garden in Gloucestershire by Daniel Combes Garden. Photography: Britt Willoughby

At the same time, manicured lawns, once a status symbol, especially during the Victorian era, are increasingly seen for what they are: water-hungry, high-input, biodiversity-poor spaces.

As Combes points out “Lawns are only going to become more maintenance-heavy, requiring greater inputs, energy and stress to keep them green. As our summers grow hotter and drier, they’ll increasingly take on their natural brown hue as spring gives way to summer, and that will start to look at odds with the surrounding landscape.

“But if we move from resistance to acceptance, if we work with nature rather than against it, we can begin to see the beauty not just in the lush greens of spring, but also in their graceful fading to gold and brown.

“We can still have generous open spaces, pasture-style areas or mixed-species lawns managed more like meadows, with small sections near the house kept green if really necessary. But the era of the large, uniform lawn is over.

“A small, well-considered lawn should now be seen as a luxury, one that’s only appropriate if you can harvest your own water and plant drought-tolerant grasses. Not all lawns are bad; it’s simply about changing how we use them and what species we choose.”

Plantlife’s “No Mow May” campaign has helped change attitudes, showing how letting grass grow encourages wildflowers, boosts insect populations, and increases resilience. Lawns trimmed to within an inch of their lives not only reduce habitat, they also offer little flood protection. In fact, bone-dry, tightly clipped lawns can repel rainwater as effectively as concrete.

So if restoration is your goal, then less lawn might mean more biodiversity, better drainage, and lower maintenance costs.

And there’s reason for optimism.

In the UK alone, domestic gardens cover around 433,000 hectares, more than all nature reserves combined, offering a vast opportunity to reverse environmental decline from our own backyards.

Dr Sally Gouldstone, founder of Seilich Botanicals, puts it simply: “It’s not gardening that’s gone wrong, it’s the wider environmental impacts caused by humans. Gardens now give us an opportunity to help mitigate these problems.”

She also encourages a more relaxed and fluid view of what belongs in a garden.

“We should think of gardens as linked spaces. If we can make landscapes more permeable, species can move with climate change.

“We need to loosen the idea of ‘nativeness.’ With climate change, species will naturally move. If a plant isn’t invasive and doesn’t require lots of inputs, let’s welcome it.”

In the end, gardens may be one of the most powerful tools we have to connect with nature, adapt to a changing climate, and rediscover beauty in restraint.

In gardening terms, perhaps less really is more.

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