Plant nurseries built to handle droughts

Because of the restrictions on watering outdoors, you may be looking at ways to keep your garden beautiful.

What You Need To Know

Plant nurseries have a business model that relies on its own water supply

Anne Hall owns Norwood Gardens with her husband

There are ranges of services from landscape design to smaller plants you can keep indoors

Water restrictions are intended to protect the water supply while giving homeowners the chance to keep up their homes and yards, including restaurants serving tapwater only upon request.

Anne Hall said plant nurseries are engineered to handle a lack of rain.

“In the industry, we are always preparing for that because water is your lifeblood,” she said.

Hall owns Norwood Gardens with her husband in North Raleigh.

“I like for people in every walk of life to be able to enjoy smart plantings so that they can have their space beautified,” she said.

She, her husband and some of her children have run Norwood Gardens since late 2021.

Their irrigation system relies on a manmade pond on the nursery grounds.

“It stabilizes conditions for when we head into something like a drought,” Hall said.

She described it as a self-sustaining conservation system.

“It keeps us stable. Because if, for instance, if we were completely reliant on that, you know, an outside source like the city of Raleigh or something else that would devastate probably our business,” Hall said.

She said it’s a business model designed to handle conditions like this.

“How it will impact customers that come in, is that likely they will be looking for more drought-tolerant plants, plants that don’t require consistent irrigation, that do well in dry conditions,” Hall said.

These are her top three tips for gardening in a drought:

Keep some clay in the soil mixture
Mulch with a triple shredded hardwood that helps to hold the moisture
Buy drought-tolerant plants

According to the North Carolina Climate Office, Raleigh has had just 1/10 of an inch of rain so far in April and less than inches of rain since March 1.