Gravel Gardens for a Changing Climate

As homeowners and gardeners seek ways to conserve resources, aid wildlife and reduce their landscape’s contributions to climate change, horticulturist Jeff Epping, a designer of ecologically sound gardens, offers an effective solution they can employ: gravel gardens.

Epping will visit Bridgehampton this Sunday afternoon to be the next guest in the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons’ lecture series and present “Gravel Gardens: Gardens for Our Changing Climate.” During an interview on Monday, Epping touted the benefits of gravel gardens, including requiring less maintenance, water and fertilizer than a traditional ornamental garden while being as lush as any other perennial garden.

Despite the name, there is a lot more to gravel gardens than just tiny pieces of rocks. Gravel gardens are planted with perennial plants that can tolerate drought, including flowering native plants. The gravel serves as a groundcover that prevents water from running off the garden — directing water to the roots where it’s needed — and suppresses weeds by denying weed seeds the soil contact and constant moisture they require to germinate.

“The name doesn’t do it justice,” Epping said.

Epping founded the garden design firm Epping Design & Consulting in 2009 and retired a year and a half ago from his post as director of horticulture at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin, where he practiced and promoted environmentally conscious gardening for 28 years. He is currently working on a book about gravel gardens, set for release by Timber Press in early 2026.

He explained that he was first exposed to gravel gardens 25 years or so ago when a friend with a nursery installed a gravel garden as a display garden. His friend had picked up the idea from plantsman Cassian Schmidt at Hermannshof, a botanical garden in Germany.

Epping installed a gravel garden at Olbrich in 2009 and admits he was skeptical about it. “But I soon was a believer,” he said.

He added more gravel gardens at Olbrich over time and designed even more for residential and corporate clients. He said he became really passionate about gravel gardens because of their sustainability qualities.

“Once you get them established, you don’t have to water,” he noted. “So we’re not throwing tons of water on them” like with a traditional lawn.

He said he’s always been turned off by lawns because of how much energy is used to maintain them “from the fuel for all the mowing and string trimming and blowers and all that — not to mention the pollution that’s created.”

The water and chemical usage for maintaining lawns is over the top, and lawns offer nothing to speak of for wildlife, he added. Meanwhile, gravel gardens provide habitat for insects, birds and other wildlife.

“I’m not saying everybody’s going to replace their lawns with a gravel garden, but it’s one more sustainable type of gardening that we can employ to get rid of some lawn that is just not great,” he said, noting that so much lawn is never stepped on except for when it’s mowed, sprayed with herbicides and insecticides, and aerated.

Epping has tracked how much regular maintenance is required for a gravel garden compared to other gardens and said it’s about 80 percent less maintenance than a typical flower garden.

The maintenance includes cutting back last year’s growth in spring and removing it, raking the garden lightly and blowing out any organic matter that accumulated in the gravel.

The stems are left up all winter so birds can eat the seeds on the seedheads, and insects can overwinter in the stems. Rather than cut stems flush to the ground in spring, he leaves 6 inches behind for bee nesting sites. The rest of the stems, he lays in a back area of his garden so the insects that spent winter inside them can finish pupating.

The gravel is four to five inches deep. It could be chipped gravel or pea gravel. The particles are of the same approximate size, about a quarter inch. Epping compares it to a jar full of marbles. “You can shake them, squeeze them, do whatever you want, but you’re never going to get rid of the airspace in between those individual marbles, and that’s what we’re looking at with this type of gravel,” he said. “We want the airspace there because it prevents weed seeds from germinating in it.”

It’s very important to select the most drought tolerant species of plants for a gravel garden, Epping said. These are plants that are native to regions of the world that are dryer, oftentimes mountainous regions, prairies and grasslands, he explained.

For Northeast gravel gardens, he recommends U.S. native grasses such as little bluestem and prairie dropseed and flowering U.S. natives such as pale purple coneflower, Tennessee purple coneflower and calamint.

The ideal size plants to install a gravel garden come in 3-inch, 4-inch and quart-size pots and deep plug trays, he said, though when certain plants are only available in gallon-size pots, that’s what he’ll buy.

“I like to select a plant palette that has things in bloom as early in the season as possible, and then last all the way up till the end, finishing off with asters and goldenrods,” Epping said. “And it’s amazing how quickly these gardens fill in.”

He said it’s not necessary to have 150 different types of plants in a gravel garden. “You could do it with 10 or 12,” he said, and the fewer different types of plants used, the more refined the design, for a kept look.

Even bulbs can be planted in gravel gardens because they thrive in the dry conditions of gravel gardens in the summer, he said. “In fact, we lose a lot of our bulbs that we plant in our gardens because of overwatering when they’re dormant.”

Most bulbs are native to mountainous climates with dry, rocky soils and want it to be dry during the summer, he pointed out.

Jeff Epping presents “Gravel Gardens: Gardens for Our Changing Climate” on Sunday, October 13, at 2 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Community House, 2368 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton. Admission is $10, or free for Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons members. Visit hahgarden.org for more information.