LANGUEDOC & PROVENCE SUN

Oliver Flippi

Olivier and Clara Filippi have been gardening in the south of France for well over a quarter century. Theirs is a mediterranean climate, and their nursery, Pépinière Filippi, located near Montpellier, specializes in plants adapted to the dry-summer/wet-winter cycles that you find in only five large regions on earth: the Mediterranean zone, proper; South Africa; the southwest corner of Australia; Chile; and much of California.

Olivier Filippi’s recent The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and Practices for a Changing Climate,  is a straight book on Mediterranean gardening and plants suited to Mediterranean climates—something that probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since that’s the focus of the author’s nursery.

There’s a brief introduction to what constitutes a Mediterranean climate, followed by notes on the strategies plants use to survive and thrive in it. Good advice on planning, planting, establishing and watering a new Mediterranean garden comes next. Then Filippi gives us the heart of the book, a listing of over 400 Mediterranean-adapted species, containing common and scientific names, approximate mature plant sizes, and notes on cultivation and propagation. The plant list definitely Eurocentric: lots of different lavenders, cistus, phlomis, for example, with relatively few plants from other the other great Mediterranean regions. In fact, many of the non-Mediterranean Mediterranean-friendly plants listed are drought tolerant selections from several non-Mediterranean climates. One of the book’s most outstanding features is the use of a “drought resistance code” that assigns a number from one to six to each of the species in its plant list. Based on work by plant geographer Henri Gaussen, the number quantifies the number of months of the year a plant can be expected to survive under drought stress. The book also contains instructions on how to calculate the climatic profile of where you live.