Drought-tolerant garden design, for soil that dries out.

Some ground just dries out. Sandy soil that water runs straight through, a strip in front of a south-facing wall, clay that sets like concrete by August, or the thin dusty earth under an established tree. Whatever goes in there sulks, then browns, and by the end of a dry summer it has gone.

Drought-tolerant garden design starts from that condition rather than from a style. The plants are picked because they can find their own water and hang on to it: deep roots, silver or felted leaves, narrow or waxy foliage, fleshy stems. Once they are established they get through a dry summer on rainfall alone, which is the whole point of them.

Garden Design App reads a photo of your real garden and redesigns the planting for the spot you actually have, keeping your paths, walls and existing trees where they are.

The sunny half of the palette is the one people know: silver mounds of artemisia and lamb's ears, tall spires of verbascum, hazy Russian sage, blue fescue and the clean architectural heads of agapanthus. They want poor, free-draining ground and full sun, and once they have their roots down they need next to no watering.

It is a deliberately ordinary list. Nothing needs a specialist nursery and most of it does better neglected than fussed over. Only agapanthus asks a real question: the deciduous kinds are reliably hardy here, while the evergreen ones are tender enough to want a sheltered spot or a winter under cover. Your planting plan names every one, how many of each, how big it grows and exactly where it goes, so drought-resistant plants stop being a vague idea and become a shopping list.

Dry shade, the ground under a mature tree or along a north-facing fence, is the hardest spot in any garden, because the tree drinks first and everything else gets what is left. Lavender and gravel will not rescue it. What works is a different set entirely: epimedium, Geranium macrorrhizum and bergenia, leathery evergreen ground cover that roots into dust and stays green on nothing.

That is why it travels across styles instead of being only one of them. A gravel garden and a Mediterranean garden are two sun-baked looks that happen to be drought-tolerant. A cottage border, a low-maintenance front garden or a shady side return can each be planted to survive a drought as well, and still look nothing like one another.

When you find a design you love, unlock its professional planting plan: every plant named, how many of each, exactly where it goes, and a month-by-month flowering calendar so the dry garden still has something going on from spring to autumn.

Professional garden designers often charge over £1,000 for this. Your first 3 garden designs are free, so you can see your own garden reimagined before you spend anything.

A drought-tolerant scheme divides by light rather than by look. The sunny half wants an open, free-draining border; the hard half is dry shade under a tree, where the roots take the water long before anything else sees it.

For colour it leans on silver and green foliage more than on flower, with blues and purples from Russian sage and agapanthus doing most of the rest.