What the London Hosepipe Ban Means for Your Garden

As of yesterday, over 10 million of us across London, the Thames Valley and the Home Counties are living with a hosepipe ban. Thames Water made the call after one of the driest springs in living memory, followed by a June that broke heat records — and it's the right call. Rivers and reservoirs need the break, and so, if we're honest, do our gardens.

We know the timing feels cruel. Mid-summer, gardens at their thirstiest, and now the hose is off-limits for anything beyond the essentials. But here at Formosa, we've always believed a garden's resilience is designed in long before the first dry spell — not scrambled together once the ban notice lands. So rather than treat this as a crisis, we'd like to treat it as a useful nudge.

First, the practical bit

A hosepipe ban means no sprinklers, no hose-fed watering of lawns, beds or pots, no topping up pools or hot tubs, and no hosing down patios or cars. It doesn't mean no watering at all. Watering cans are still entirely fair game — it's simply about cutting the volume and the waste that comes with an unattended hose.

A few things worth knowing if you're trying to keep a garden alive through this:

Established plants are tougher than they look. Most mature shrubs, trees and perennials have root systems deep enough to ride out several weeks without supplemental water. Resist the urge to fuss over them daily — a good, occasional soak with a can does more good than frequent light sprinkles, which just encourage shallow roots.

New plantings are the priority. Anything gone in within the last 12 months hasn't built that resilience yet, and deserves what limited watering-can time you have.

Water at dawn or dusk, not midday, so less is lost to evaporation before it ever reaches the roots.

Mulch, if you haven't already. A few centimetres of bark, compost or leaf mould over exposed soil locks in moisture and cuts down how often anything needs watering at all. It's one of the simplest, least glamorous jobs in the garden and one of the most effective.

Let the lawn go brown. It looks alarming, but UK lawns are remarkably good at bouncing back once rain returns. Grass going dormant in a dry spell is a survival strategy, not a death sentence — save your watering-can effort for the borders instead.

Drip or trickle irrigation system. If your garden already has (or could use) a system like that, it's one of the few genuinely compliant ways to keep beds watered through a ban — and it's also simply a more efficient way to water day-to-day, ban or no ban.

The bigger picture

This is the second summer running large parts of the UK have needed restrictions like this, and it's unlikely to be the last. If there's a silver lining, it's that bans like this tend to be the moment people start asking a better question than “how do I keep this alive this week” — namely, “how do I design a garden that barely notices the next one of these.”

That's a conversation we have with clients often, and it doesn't mean giving up a lush, layered, beautiful garden. Drought-tolerant planting has come a long way from gravel and yucca — think Mediterranean and prairie-style planting schemes, deep-rooting perennials, and structural planting that holds its shape and colour through a dry spell rather than wilting the moment the hose goes quiet. Good soil preparation, sensible zoning of thirstier plants closer to the house, and simple water-harvesting details like a butt fed from a downpipe can all take real pressure off a garden without taking anything away from how it looks or feels.

It's also, quietly, one of the more sustainable ways to garden — less water drawn from an already stretched supply, less time spent worrying, and a garden that looks its best in August rather than merely surviving it.

If this summer has left you looking at a stressed lawn or a border that needs more attention than you'd like, and wondering whether there's a smarter way to do it, we'd love to have that conversation. It's exactly the kind of thing we help clients think through — for a garden that copes with next year's dry spell before it's even arrived.

Stay cool out there, and go easy on the watering can