The title of the new book Designing the Lush Dry Garden: Create a Climate-Resilient, Low-Water Paradise reveals much of what you need to know about what’s between the covers, but hearing the story behind it will tell you a lot more.

Like every public garden, the legendary Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA, closed when the pandemic struck. Wanting to connect with gardeners during that time, the garden began offering online classes. “After a year we had a pretty good idea of what people were interested in as well as what they needed to know—but maybe didn’t know that they needed to know,” explain Cricket Riley and Alice Kitajima, two of the book’s coauthors. In March 2021, Riley and Kitajima helped the Ruth Bancroft Garden launch their Dry Garden Design Certificate Program, which hundreds of gardeners have since completed. Now, Designing the Lush Dry Garden is meant to bring the ideas taught in this course and the deep institutional knowledge of the Ruth Bancroft Garden to an even wider audience.

Photography by Caitlin Atkinson for Designing the Lush Dry Garden.

So who is this book for? Fellow Gardenista contributor Kier Homes, the third coauthor of the book, tells me, “It’s for gardeners curious about switching or tweaking the way they currently garden to an approach that is more water-conscious, sustainable, resilient, and in-sync with their climate.” Riley adds the book was written with both the novice and experienced gardener in mind. The lessons in the first part of the book lay out the basic steps to design a low-water garden, but “we also provide extensive lists of dependable, low-water plants that many people experienced in the field might not know about,” she notes. (The favorite plant lists alone might be worth the cover price.)