gardening lessons for | Gardening Lessons for Next Year

Gardening lessons for: a concise orientation before we get practical.

Published on December 11th, 2025 Posted In: Garden Style & Living
Author: Alexandra Campbell

The gardening lessons from the past year weren’t all new. But they went beyond fashion or ‘trends’ to become an important part of the gardener’s toolkit for the future.

Gardening has been through a fast pace of change over the past few years. Traditional ideas have been turned on their heads and common tasks are being reevaluated.

So looking back at 2025, which garden ideas are we going to take into next year and beyond?

Here are the key gardening lessons from my 2025 interviews with expert garden designers, growers and head gardeners. They’re not ‘quick hacks’ or passing fashions. These are the changes that I believe are here to stay.

On the left, a contemporary garden designed around 10 years ago. Right shows the same garden designed by Tomoko Kawauchi and Charlotte Rowe in their award-winning contemporary style.

Gardening With Less Water

One of the strongest themes is ‘gardening with less water’. In the past, water management advice for the garden didn’t go much beyond ‘add a water butt or rain barrel’. Now, that’s no longer the first or most important recommendation.

Soil is Your Biggest Reservoir of Water – Much More Important Than Water Butts!

At RHS Wisley, Janet Manning, senior horticultural adviser in water management, explains that the most important thing to think about is soil. The biggest reservoir you have is the soil under your feet.

Healthy soil holds more water when it rains, so you don’t have to carry so much water around later. Looking after soil means mulching.

All the living things in soil – earthworms, springtails, bacteria and fungi – need water as much as plants. They break down organic matter and provide nutrients for plants, and when they do this, they produce sticky substances that help the soil hold onto more moisture.

How to Mulch for Better Water Management

Mulch isn’t just for water management: it also suppresses weeds and keeps roots cool in summer and more protected in winter. It acts like insulation.

You can use:

Homemade compost
Straw
Dried herbaceous stems, chopped up
Lawn mowings (in thin layers)

Janet suggests using a chunky mulch on the surface, such as pine bark or coco chips. These loose, larger particles let water drain straight through into the root zone.

Finer materials like homemade compost or multi-purpose compost are designed to hold moisture. If they sit on the surface in hot, dry weather, they can keep the moisture where it dries out fastest. So Janet says that the principle is:

Chunky bits on top
Finer material underneath

This ensures that rain goes straight through the top layer and into the soil where it’s needed.

You May Be Watering Too Much!

One of the best gardening lessons from 2025 also came from Janet.

When plants get too much water, they pump it back out into the atmosphere through their leaves.

When they’re short of water, their first line of defence is to close the little holes in their leaves (known as stomata). That means plants can get quite dry before they absolutely need watering again.

It also means there is no point in over-watering – it’ll only be pumped out into the air. So forget advice to ‘water regularly’ or ‘water daily’.

Clever watering tips from the RHS

Water your plants only when the soil is properly dry around them. I bought this moisture meter and used it to judge when to water. I spent so much less time watering last summer, although we were officially in drought plus a hosepipe ban! (note: links to Amazon are affiliate, see disclosure)

When you do water, water the soil around the plants thoroughly. Give the roots a deep, long soak.

See Garden Watering Strategies – How to Save Time, Effort and Money.

Sand, Gravel and Rubble Gardens

Another new approach to low-water gardening is to create drought-resilient planting in sand, gravel or rubble.

At West Deans Gardens, head gardener and award-winning author Tom Brown has created both a sand and a gravel garden.

Sand garden at RHS Chelsea designed by Nigel Dunnett for Hospitalfields.

What Is a Sand Garden?

Sand (and similar materials like rubble or recycled concrete) is a very free-draining, inert medium. In Tom’s garden, plants are grown:

With no added fertility
With no supplementary irrigation

This area, known as The Sunken Garden, had been planted with evergreens and lawn. They removed the hard landscaping and lawns.

As Tom explained, traditional Mediterranean plants are brilliantly drought-resistant in hot, dry summers but can struggle in our cold, wet winters. A top layer of sand or gravel means that roots can ‘retreat’ away from the cold, wet mud of winter.

They laid about 10cm of sand on top of the existing soil. At West Dean, the underlying soil is flinty and chalky, so it was already free-draining.

This layer holds enough moisture in summer to sustain plants, yet provides free drainage in wet winters.

Tom suggests that gardeners on heavier clay soils might start with a small experimental patch. The 10cm sand layer may act as a sanctuary in wet winters, allowing plants to retreat into the sand and regrow into the clay in spring.

The Sunken Garden at West Dean. The bottom photo shows the sand garden in its previous format, with evergreens and lawn. A friend of mine told me it was still looking as good as in the top photo in early November.

Planting Into Sand

Plants are set into the sand so that:

The top two-thirds of the rootball are in contact with the sand
The bottom third touches the soil below

Deep-rooted plants then anchor down and find the water they need. Although it seems counter-intuitive, the sand does hold moisture. Tom compares it to walking on a hot sandy beach: the surface can be scorching, but dig your toes in and it quickly feels cool and damp.

The sand also reflects light and creates a more hospitable rooting zone than a traditional border that dries out quickly.

See The Sand Garden – A Bold, New Trend in Resilient Garden Design.

The 10cm sand layer also helps suppress weeds because it reduces humidity at the surface, making it harder for weed seeds to germinate

Any weeds that do appear are easy to pull out. Tom suggests weeding little-and-often to stop problems from building up.

Rubble gardens made of recycled building materials

At the Horniman Museum and Gardens in southeast London, head of horticulture Errol Fernandes has developed a xerophytic garden. This is made up entirely of plants adapted to cope with extreme conditions, especially drought.

He re-used building materials to create a well-drained garden along similar lines to the sand and gravel gardens.

The Horniman Museum decided to lift and re-lay its paths. So they retained about 15 tonnes of crushed concrete subbase (type one MOT) instead of sending it to landfill.

Deep trenches were dug and filled with the crushed and broken-up concrete – some of it boulder-sized.
Concrete fines were used on top. Concrete fines are the sandy particles created when concrete is crushed. It’s being increasingly used instead of sand, as it is a by-product of manufacturing.
This reuse of material fits the Horniman’s climate and ecology aims. It also creates a hot, dry, well-drained environment suited to xerophytic plants.

These plants at the Horniman Museum & Gardens in London are grown in building rubble recycled from a path project.

Gardening With Less Work

After gardening with less water comes gardening with less work.

There is, however, an important reminder from garden designer and author James Alexander-Sinclair: low maintenance is not the same as no maintenance. A truly “no maintenance” garden is essentially one that is covered in concrete.

And I would add that even an all concrete yard will need some cleaning and spraying at some point!

Chop and Drop Mulching

At Veddw, a garden created by Anne Wareham and photographer Charles Hawes, Anne says she never does the traditional autumn clear-up:

‘I couldn’t face cutting everything down, dragging it to the compost heap, waiting for it to rot, then bringing it back as mulch!’ she says.

Instead:

She cuts most foliage down in autumn (with some plants, such as grasses, left to spring)
Using a strimmer, hedge trimmer or shears, she shreds the material as it is chopped down.
Then she simply leaves it in place to break down on the borders.

This “chop and drop” approach:

Saves work
Provides mulch where it falls, helping to protect plants from winter
Breaks down to add nutrition to the soil

Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes’ Veddw garden where they do ‘chop and drop’. The borders are strimmed down, mainly in autumn and they leave it all where it falls so it can rot down and nourish the soil.

See more about Anne’s low work gardening methods in The Low Maintenance Garden That Really Looks Fabulous.

Leave the Leaves

The social media hashtag #LeaveTheLeaves has now gone mainstream in real life. London Parks and the RHS both issued advice last summer to:

Leave leaves under trees
Leave them in borders and other areas where people don’t walk

The leaves:

Rot down and return nutrients to the soil
Feed microbes and worms
Reduce work for the gardener

We have always left leaves on our borders. They rot down quite quickly by spring.

However, whenever I have tried to bag leaves up to make leaf mould, they have taken so long to break down that I’ve never actually got any usable leaf mould!

Gardening lessons from 2025 – even the Royal Parks and the RHS advised us to leave the leaves (but not on paths or where people walk).

See Leave the Leaves – The New Easy Way to Deal With Autumn Gardens.

Leaving Seedheads Over Winter

Another way to let the garden “mulch itself” is to delay the traditional autumn clear-up until spring. Professional gardeners increasingly advise leaving seedheads over winter for three main reasons:

Wildlife
- Birds feed on the seeds
- Insects shelter in stems and collapsing foliage
Beauty
- A different kind of beauty in low light, frost or snow
- More austere and ghostly, but still attractive
Less Work and Better Soil
- By early spring, much of the material has collapsed and started rotting into the soil
- This improves soil structure and fertility

Leaving a border untouched all winter can look messy, but it can also form a rather beautiful, natural “mess.”

Winter gardening lessons: leave the seedheads and grasses until late winter or early spring. Many will have rotted down already so there’ll be less to clear away. These are my borders and I rather love the texture of the ‘mess’.

See the 20 Best Plants for Seedheads here.

Self-Seeders, Pioneer Species and Wildflowers

One downside of leaving seedheads is more self-seeding. However, self-seeders can be a benefit:

They fill gaps in borders
They are usually easy to pull out when small
But you need to be aware that some self-seeders can be invasive

Pioneer species, wildflowers and self-seeders are increasingly seen as a low-work, low-cost and environmentally friendly alternative to large blocks of bedding plants.

At RHS Chelsea, pioneer species were highlighted in Jo Perkins’ King’s Cross Garden. These are plants that:

Self-seed
Survive in harsh, difficult conditions
Often colonise difficult areas first – such as an abandoned industrial site. They then break down, creating a soil for future plants

On the Kent Wildflower stand, wildflowers were promoted for:

Filling gaps in borders
Creating whole wildflower borders

Consider wildflowers and self-seeders to fill gaps in borders rather than bedding plants. This is my Classic border from Pictorial Meadows.

Relaxed Lawns and Lawn Alternatives

One of the gardening lessons that finally resonated in 2025 is a more relaxed approach to lawn care. In Monty Don’s ‘Dog Garden’ at RHS Chelsea, designed with Jamie Butterworth, they included a lawn because dog love lawns.

Children love lawns, too and open space is a good contrast to full or colourful planting.

However, the lawn was not perfect. It had weeds. It wasn’t bright emerald green. There were no stripes. It was a real lawn and the message was that lawns do not need to be perfect.

The Monty Don Dog Garden at RHS Chelsea had a lawn, but it was quite scruffy (top). This gives us all permission not to have a perfect lawn! Although there is a negative view of lawns in some places, they absorb heat, carbon dioxide and rainfall.

See RHS Chelsea 2025 – Ideas You Can Use in Your Garden.

Working With Nature, Not Against It

One of my favourite garden lessons from 2025 is work with nature, not against it.

There’s now much more common ground between cultivated gardens and re-wilding, with people picking up elements that suit their lifestyle or philosophy. There’s more of a mix – introducing some wilder elements into traditional garden situations.

Getting rid of things is no longer the default. For example, at Hampton Court Flower Show, brambles were used decoratively in the main RHS sign – although it may be some time before that becomes mainstream.

Top gardeners are embracing:

Wildlife-supporting ideas
Reduced intervention
A more relaxed approach to weeds and pests. Even slugs and snails are being recognised as having some value in the garden.
The State of Gardening report from the RHS found that 80% of UK gardeners no longer use pesticides and weedkillers
The RHS report on gardening also found that 42% of UK gardeners don’t send any garden waste to landfill
Most garden waste is composted, but the garden shows also highlighted decorative ways to use logs and clipping. These will decompose very slowly, offering habitat and food for the microbes and fungi that keep soil healthy.
Use logs and clippings decoratively in the garden.

Rethinking Moss

Moss is no longer automatically seen as something to get rid of.

In the Japanese Tea Garden, which won Best in Show and People’s Choice at RHS Chelsea 2025, designer Kazuyuki Ishihara used moss in beautifully curated moss balls.

In other show gardens, moss appeared more informally. Moss can be slippy on pathways and can damage roofing, but otherwise – if you’ve got it, flaunt it!

A Stylish and Wildlife-friendly Way of Tidying Up

At the Horniman Museum and Gardens, Errol Fernandes has developed another way of working with garden “waste”: tying up grasses and seedheads at the end of winter instead of composting them.

The prairie garden at the Horniman was designed with Professor James Hitchmough in 2018. It is planted in 15cm of gravel, with mainly North American and South African prairie plants.

This gravel mulch keeps plant crowns from rotting in winter. The plants would die if a soil layer developed around their crowns, as it would hold moisture close in cold, wet conditions.

So the maintenance regime has always been to cut and compost the old grasses and seedheads in late March.

However, baseline studies with an ecologist showed that many insects overwinter in hollow stems and under seedheads

When material is cut in March and thrown on the compost heap, those invertebrates go with it.

Tying Instead of Composting

The ecologist, Johnny Johnson, suggested leaving the material. Errol couldn’t leave it on the prairie bed because of the gravel mulch and the need to avoid soil build-up. Instead, they:

Tie the cut material into bundles and attach them to posts

These bundles:

Look sculptural, almost pagan
Provide nesting material, seeds and shelter
Allow insects to emerge later in spring

The key is that:

Bundles are removed by mid-June so they don’t cast shade on the prairie plants
New bundles are added each year

Visitors respond positively, and many horticulturists recognise this as a useful solution.

Gardeners at home can do something similar:

Create a teepee with old hazel sticks and stuff it with grasses and hollow stems
Or bang hazel poles into the ground and tie bundles to them

It’s important not to be too quick to dispose of this material, especially as insects – particularly flying insects in cities – are in decline.

Seedheads tied to hazel posts at the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

See more about Growing the Future – New Gardening Ideas.

Garden Design Ideas For Next Year: Less Lawn, More Planting

These ideas have also changed garden design.

The contemporary garden today. Top shows the award-winning garden designed by Tomoko Kawauchi and Charlotte Rowe of Charlotte Rowe Garden Design. The image below it was the same garden designed in an earlier contemporary style.

These before-and-after pictures from an award-winning garden by Tomoko Kawauchi and Charlotte Rowe of Charlotte Rowe Garden Design show how contemporary gardens have shifted:

Less lawn, even in generous-sized town gardens
More planting, especially trees and ornamental grasses
A stronger focus on rethinking the garden as a designed space – paths create a journey to and from seating areas.
Bring planting closer to the house.
Planting flows into the terrace space
Reduce areas of solid hard landscaping
Mixed pavers, brick and planting for better drainage but with visual links.

Mixed pavers, gravel and planting in the garden designed by Charlotte Rowe Garden Designs. There’s a unity across the materials, but they are broken in a way that feels natural and flowing (and improves drainage!)

See more garden design detail tips in this interview with Tomoko and Charlotte.

For smaller gardens, many people are replacing lawns altogether with more planting and only using hard landscaping where they really need to sit or dine. Alternatives to solid slabs of paving are appearing more often.

At the stand of the Association of Professional Landscapers (APL), there were examples of mixing materials, such as:

Stone or pavers with gravel
Brick or decking used only in short runs where firmness is needed
Wood chip combined with more solid surfaces

The idea is to create practical surfaces without covering the whole space in solid paving.

See: Garden Path Materials – How to Choose and Garden Ideas from RHS Hampton Court That You Can Use At Home.

Blobs and Structure in Relaxed Planting

With more relaxed planting, gardens still need clear points to anchor the space. At shows, one common motif was clipped balls and blobs next to lush planting

At Architectural Plants, managing director Guy explains their term “blobbery”.

Blobs are:

Groups of plants clipped into rounded forms
Often wider than they are tall
Sometimes merging into each other
Made up of different plant species and shapes
Underplanted beneath trees (using shade-tolerant plants)
Placed in sunny positions as living sculpture
Blobs provide clear, defined shapes and strong structure among looser planting

‘Blobs’ at Jo Thompson’s show garden at RHS Chelsea and at Architectural Plants.

See What is A Blobbery – Structure All Year Round.

Gardening Lessons from Design Experts – Garden Furniture as Sculpture

In conversation with garden designers Joe Swift and James Alexander-Sinclair (who co-host the James and Jo Garden Show podcast and write for The Garden Collective), they point out that seating is:

Important for how you move through the garden
A way to create destinations and pause points
They also suggest treating furniture as sculpture
You spend more time looking at it than sitting on it
It becomes a major feature in the garden

Instead of buying “any old thing” from a garden centre, they recommend:

Spending money on good-quality, visually pleasing furniture
Avoiding cheap white plastic and large plastic rattan sets that dominate the space

Furniture is a big decision because it draws the eye and can either support the design or undermine it.

Both these benches are comfortable (top is at Veddw, below is at Gravetye Manor Hotel & Gardens). But they are also an important focal point. Garden seating is important! See How to Choose the Best Furniture for Your Garden.

James and Joe’s advice on garden design was brilliant. See Top Garden Designers Reveal the Biggest Gardening Mistake.

Embracing Realism Rather Than Perfection

One of the most important gardening lessons we’re beginning to learn is that we need to embrace realism, rather than aiming for an idealised, highly controlled look.

This may become increasingly difficult as AI is used to create unrealistically colourful images of gardens that never existed. But perhaps ‘messy’ will become the new ‘authentic’! Look for photographs from named photographers (all the photographs on The Middlesized Garden are taken by me, unless otherwise labelled.)

Gardens can be beautiful without being perfect. At the Beth Chatto Gardens, head gardener Åsa Gregers-Warg points out that:

After very dry summers, you can’t expect the garden to look as lush in July as it does in May or early June
Even drought-resistant plants won’t always look wonderful in the middle of a heatwave. But they will recover.
See Asa’s plant choices in 12 Autumn Perennials for Sun and Shade

Accepting That Plants Die

Garden designer and grower Jamie Butterworth, author of What Grows Together, offers a piece of advice that gardeners don’t hear often enough: plants die.

His key points are:

Don’t get overwhelmed in the garden centre
Plants have to both look good together and grow well together
Some combinations will work, some won’t
When plants die, it gives you an opportunity to plant something else

He compares it to cooking – except that in gardening, it can take six months to know whether you got it right. Not being afraid of failure is a major hurdle to overcome.

My garden in autumn (top) and spring. Fallen leaves, patchy lawn…

See 6 Easy Planting Tips for Beginners from Jamie Butterworth.

What Are Your Gardening Lessons for Next Year?

Which of these gardening lessons for next year are you most likely to try? Are you most interested in mulching and water-wise soil care, sand and rubble gardens, chop and drop, wildflowers, blobs, or rethinking your garden furniture?

Let me know which ideas you think will really shape gardens in the future.