If you don't group them according to their water needs, one of several things will happen:

1. you will drive yourself nuts trying to meet each plant's requirements

2. The drought-tolerant ones will die

3. or the moisture-requiring ones will die.

In other words, you need to decide what you will plant and how you will manage them.

A useful guideline:

Plant the moisture-requiring plants close in where you can enjoy them and easily tend them,

but plant drought-tolerant ones as you move outward, toward the boundaries of the property.

Pretty much all the plants you listed get the same treatment in my gardens - well mulched, but left to their own devices as far as water unless we go 3 weeks or more without appreciable quantities of rain.

Other plants which aren't tolerant of moisture I plant on a slope in a well-drained sunny area and don't water at all unless they show distress. I keep those separate.

I don't segregate drought-tolerant plants from those that do well in other growing conditions. They're all planted cheek by jowl in my various garden beds. None receive supplemental water unless they're newly planted. For those I purchased this season, I set plant nannies in the soil up close to the base of each one and feed/water them daily with a mild solution of water + organic seaweed extract. After that, they live or don't by whatever Mother Nature dishes out.

Most of my garden beds were part sun/part shade until gypsy moth caterpillars stripped bare the 5 mature (150+ year old) oak trees in my garden. Now they're all full sun and many things are suffering, even daylilies.

until gypsy moth caterpillars stripped bare the 5 mature (150+ year old) oak trees

That is a shame; it might have brought me to tears :(.

I thought of an easy way to explain this because I've heard it so often from nearly anyone visits my garden.

A plant that tolerates wet feet doesn't mean the plant requires wet feet. A plant that tolerates drought doesn't mean the plant requires drought.

Drainage is more of an issue than the amount of watering.

Gardenweed, feel free to send those moth caterpillars down here, I'd gladly release them on the neighbors junk trees that shade my yard.

A plant that tolerates

and maybe similarly..a plant that tolerates shade may still likely do better with more sun

ranger got it ... its a word use issue ...

tolerance.. means it can tolerate something .. e.g. hosta are shade tolerant ... but they grow like heck in sun ... unfortunately ... though they do.. they get ugly as heck as they burn up in summer heat ...

hosta do NOT require shade ... just as your plants do NOT require drought ...

so the two words are required.. vs... tolerate ..

and frankly ... if they are so foo foo .. that they need special requirements.. be glad they die.. and go find something else .. and barely anything you list is foo foo .. except if you have hyrbrid T roses .. or some such .. the hydrenga could also be an exception in too much sun ... but if had one in shade for years.. and havent watered it in 3 years.. and just like the hosta.. it isnt pretty.. or happy.. but its still there ...

great question to think and talk about.. i wouldnt spend one minute 'worrying' about any of it .. unfortunately it took me 20 years of gardening to get to that point.. maybe you can get there faster.. with my wisdom .. lol

ken

There are also regional factors like humidity and how hot you define hot to be. Around here hot means 100+ degrees for long stretches. Temps reaching the 90's but no higher all summer = a cool summer. Hot is a relative term and so is dry. Dry here means drought for weeks on end, not a lack of weekly or every other week or even once every three weeks rain. If we got rain that often in summer we'd call it a very wet summer.

Sun is also relative. Sun down here it is a lot more intense but shade is also brighter. Full sun loving plants suited for more northerly zones usually do better with part sun or bright shade down here. We can grow many full sun plants in much shadier conditions further south and this applies vice versa, you can grow some shade loving plants from here in full sun up north with more moisture and less intense sun.

Some plants that are drought hardy won't take high humidity, I've had more problems with that than soil moisture when trying to grow xeric plants.

Thank you all for your input. . . a few of you actually answered my question better than the way I asked it. . . I meant to word it asking if they are drought tolerant does it mean they have to be grown in drought conditions.

I have been fairly successful as a gardener, and I giggle at myself when I think back to my beginning years, not knowing enough to pay attention to growing requirements, size or even zones for that matter. Now fast forward 30+ years with a lot of trial and error under my belt, I start to question my own wisdom.

I do water, and I do coddle to a certain extent. I have 2 makeover beds this year with mostly new perennials so I do water when they pout, I do so deeply. My Anise Hissop was less than 6" tall when I got it, it is at the back of the bed and is already taller than an antique tricycle beside it, same with the babies breath which was bought at the same time. So they must approve, maybe???

I agree Ken, I don't want a fussy plant, I choose my plants for color, size, and eye candy. If it doesn't like me and checks out, OH WELL. It just so happens, I really like the plants in here, I hope they like me too.

We never, ever have humidity. We have been 100 the past 4 days, and a few more days of it to come. Which is not real common here in SE Montana. Were about 60 miles from the Rocky Mountain range, so we don't really get any benefactor from that, except the view. Not a desert for sure and definetly not a swamp land.

thanks again for the input. . . :)

Debi in Montana

Personally the only problem I have had with some drought tolerant natives is they get too tall and lanky when we get heavier than normal rain in spring, sometimes they get top heavy and fall over or splay out from the center which looks awful. I trim those back to let them start over. If you also have rich soil, the problem is even worse, several plants loose their character or turn into over-grown 'monsters'.

Anise Hyssop isn't like the other kinds of Agastache that resent water, it needs extra water. If its taller than 2 ft, its probably getting excess water.

We have water rationing down here. It used to be something they did temporary but now its in place all the time. You get fined for going over the limit.