What Cher's 1970s Garden Can Teach Us About Modern Planting
Long before drought-tolerant landscaping became a mainstream movement, a handful of visionary homeowners and designers were already embracing it with quiet confidence. Among the most memorable examples is Cher's iconic 1970s California garden — a space that married bold aesthetics with practical, water-conscious planting. Decades later, its lessons feel more relevant than ever. As water conservation climbs the agenda for homeowners across the globe, the structured, textural planting philosophy behind that celebrated garden offers a surprisingly modern blueprint.
The Context: Why the 1970s Were a Turning Point for Garden Design
The 1970s were a decade of reinvention — in fashion, music, and, quietly but significantly, in how people thought about their outdoor spaces. California, in particular, was beginning to grapple with the realities of its Mediterranean climate: long, dry summers and the ongoing pressure on water resources. For homeowners willing to move beyond the traditional lawn-and-rose-bed formula, a richer, more structurally interesting alternative was emerging.
Cher's garden became emblematic of this shift. Rather than fighting against the dry Californian landscape, her planting scheme worked with it, leaning heavily on plants that thrived with minimal irrigation while delivering extraordinary visual drama. The result was a garden that looked abundantly textured and alive — not in spite of the low-water approach, but because of it.
The Power of Texture in a Low-Water Garden
One of the most enduring lessons from this era of planting is the role of texture in carrying a garden design. When you move away from the lush, soft uniformity of high-water planting, you quickly discover that drought-tolerant species compensate with extraordinary variety in leaf shape, surface quality, and structural form.
In Cher's garden, this textural interplay was central to the design's success. Spiky agaves sat alongside the feathery softness of ornamental grasses. The waxy, architectural pads of prickly pears contrasted with the silver, felted leaves of artemisia. Bold succulents punctuated the planting like exclamation points, drawing the eye and giving the composition a sculptural quality that traditional perennial borders rarely achieve.
For modern gardeners, the takeaway is clear: texture is your most powerful tool in a low-water planting scheme. Rather than relying on flower colour to sustain interest, invest in contrasts of form — the spiny against the smooth, the upright against the spreading, the fine-leaved against the broad.
Key Low-Water Plants to Borrow from the '70s Playbook
Many of the plants that defined the look of Cher's era remain excellent choices today, and they're widely available at most good garden centres. Consider incorporating the following into your scheme:
- Agave americana: The ultimate structural plant, offering bold, architectural form and extraordinary drought resilience. Its blue-grey colouring works beautifully alongside warm stone and terracotta.
- Festuca glauca (Blue Fescue): A compact ornamental grass that forms neat, steel-blue tufts. It softens the edges of harder plants and adds movement on breezy days.
- Stachys byzantina (Lamb's Ears): The silvery, velvety foliage of this ground-cover plant was a favourite of 1970s designers for good reason — it reflects light, suppresses weeds, and pairs beautifully with almost everything.
- Cistus (Rock Rose): A Mediterranean shrub that thrives on neglect and poor, dry soils while producing a generous flush of tissue-papery flowers in summer.
- Lavandula (Lavender): Arguably the most versatile low-water plant available, lavender delivers fragrance, pollinator value, silver foliage texture, and a long flowering season with minimal water input.
- Salvia nemorosa: Ornamental salvias bring vertical spires of rich purple or blue to a planting scheme and require very little irrigation once established.
The Structured Layout: Why Bones Matter More Than Blooms
Perhaps the most transferable lesson from Cher's garden is the emphasis on structure. The planting was never random or loose — it operated within a clearly defined framework of paths, levels, and focal points. This structural discipline is what prevented the low-water planting from looking sparse or neglected, even during the driest months when flowering was limited.
In practical terms, structure in a garden comes from several sources: the hard landscaping of paths, walls, and terracing; the placement of specimen plants that act as anchors; and the deliberate repetition of key plants to create rhythm and visual cohesion. In a drought-tolerant planting scheme, these principles matter even more than in a traditional garden, because you are often working with fewer blooms and relying more heavily on form and foliage to carry the design through all four seasons.
Applying These Lessons to Your Modern Garden
You don't need a sprawling Californian estate to put these ideas into practice. The principles scale beautifully to smaller spaces, including urban gardens, roof terraces, and even large containers. Start by identifying two or three strong architectural plants to act as anchors — an agave, a phormium, or a large ornamental grass works well. Build outward from these with contrasting textures, keeping colour secondary to form.
Mulching generously with gravel or crushed stone not only reduces water loss from the soil but also echoes the aesthetic of those original 1970s California gardens — lending the planting a warm, sun-baked quality that feels both contemporary and timeless. Group plants with similar water needs together, and resist the urge to over-plant: in a structured, low-water scheme, space itself becomes a design element.
A Legacy Worth Revisiting
Cher's 1970s garden was ahead of its time in more ways than one. It proved that sustainability and beauty are not competing priorities — that choosing plants suited to your climate and soil can actually elevate a garden's design rather than compromise it. As water-wise gardening becomes not just fashionable but essential, the structured, textural approach pioneered in that era stands as both inspiration and instruction. The plants are still available, the principles still work, and the results are still stunning.