Wherever I go in the world I love to see the differences and compare the similarities to our own gardening styles. While staying at a beach resort in New Jersey, in the United States recently, I’ve seen some lovely gardens and wondered what sort of challenges faced a gardener in this lovely but testing environment.

To start with, you have to know what zone you are in, for this you refer to the United States hardiness map which was created in 1990 to help when selecting plants for a particular area, it divides North America into 11 climate zones, each zone is 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, or colder than the adjacent zone.

In the UK we have followed suit with our own Plant Hardiness Zone Map, Kent being in zone 8b, I confess I never realised we had a zone, once you’ve lived somewhere a while you tend to get to know what your up against, but I can see how this would help when buying plants as you can select them by zone.

It certainly would be lovely to have the beach as your back garden, but what can you grow? Native plants are always a good option as they have adapted to the particular soil conditions and can tolerate fluctuations in weather better than non-native species.

New Jersey is in zone 7b where they have to cope with hot dry summers as well as wet winters and they are also still recovering from being hit by hurricane Sandy in 2012.

As you would imagine grasses are popular, I spotted Miscanthus sinensis (zebra grass) a clump forming native of Eastern Asia growing to 2m as well as the purple flower spiked Pennisetum sataceum rubrum (purple fountain grass) complementing a purple border beautifully.

I was surprised to see Hostas doing so well, having always thought of them as a shade lover, they are better described as shade tolerant, just avoid full afternoon sun. They were positively flourishing with not a slug or snail bitten leaf in sight, I must reassess the position of mine.

The main tree here seems to be Pinus virginiana (shrub pine; jersey pine) which grows 9-18m and Pinus rigida (pitch pine) which grows 6-30m both can tolerate poor soil conditions they looked great in a sandy bed edged with cut posts of varying heights.

Nice to see that whatever the conditions, there are gardeners all over the world prepared to do whatever they can to make a beautiful space despite the challenges thrown at them.