The rain, that a couple of days ago was forecast for all of today, by this morning was not forecast until mid afternoon, and still has not arrived now, which as I type this is nine minutes to seven. That meant that I got lots more done in the garden than I was originally hoping or expecting, which was good. The flip side is that I got nothing at all done in the house, and we do have to clean the place up before mid morning on Thursday, because some people are coming round then. Also I need to get to grips with the beekeepers' treasurer's stuff as a matter of urgency. I put it off after the handover meeting because of the lunch party, and then we went to Oxford, and it was the Systems Administrator's birthday, and I had to go to work, and I was waiting for a wet day...Enough. It has to be done, on a fine dry day if there isn't a rainy one.
Charlie Dimmock was on the Today programme, talking about how we should adapt our gardens to drought conditions. That was a blast from the past. I think she has been signed up by Thames Water to help their customers cope, or at least make it sound as though Thames Water cares, as it presides over its colossal leakage rate and hosepipe ban. I quite like Charlie Dimmock, or at least I don't mind her, but the trouble with making your garden drought resistant is that you needed to start doing it months or years ago. The advice to make sure that your soil is in good heart, with lots of organic material incorporated, is excellent, but takes a long time to achieve. If Thames Water's gardening customers haven't been adding organic soil improver every time they plant something and mulching regularly over the past two or three seasons, there isn't a lot they can do now to improve the state of their soil before the hosepipe ban starts in two days time.
I felt a sort of seeping weariness as Charlie told us that we would all need to start planting Mediterranean climate shrubs, rosemary and Ceanothus, to cope with the new dry conditions. That doesn't follow, for several reasons.
Maybe the UK is getting drier on a long term basis, though I wouldn't bet the house on that. It's not so long since the great sodden summer of 2000, and even this year parts of the north and Scotland have been torrentially wet. The midlands and southeast have only missed out on rainfall by a couple of hundred miles, which is not very much in global terms. It's true that the pressure of development in the southeast means we are all going to have to adapt to taking less out of our taps as the years go by, but there's a huge range of garden plants which don't need routine watering once established. It can't have escaped Thames Water's or Charlie's notice that we've just had a couple of long, cold winters. Perhaps they are part of climate change too, or perhaps one of those things that nature sometimes throws at us, on account of our being as far north as Newfoundland. Mediterranean climate plants have been among the top casualties in UK gardens, along with the New Zealanders. I have written whole blog entries which have been long, sad litanies of plants I had in my garden which are no more, and I have listened to many similar catalogues of woe from customers at the plant centre. Rosemary, lavender, bay, Cistus, Phlomis, Ceanothus. Gone, gone are they all, dead and gone. As well as detesting long cold winters, sogginess at the root is death to them, so if we revert to wet winters instead of freezing ones, all those Thames customers on their London clay are going to have a difficult time of it then as well.
Instead of emphasising drought tolerant Mediterranean plants, I'd try to think of normal garden plants that will tolerate dry conditions but also have a sporting chance of coming through the winter. In our garden shrubby Potentilla, holly, box, Weigela, Philadelphus, Berberis, crab apples, and yew are still looking OK after two vile winters and drought, to name a few off the top of my head. (It is not for nothing that several on this list are so beloved of municipal and commercial landscapers, which helps explain why some gardeners don't like them). Some traditional cottage garden style herbaceous plants have held up too without irrigation, including Catananche, Aconitum, Hemerocallis, some Campanula, Knautia macedonica and peonies.
Whatever you plant, you shouldn't plant it now, if you are worried about drought. Actually, I'm glad Charlie didn't say that, given my line of work, though she did say that maybe we should think about returning to the tradition of autumn planting (remember the winter, though). I am still planting now, but I'm not anticipating a hosepipe ban, and am fanatical (and fit) enough to carry cans around if needs be. Even drought tolerant species need to get their roots down before the magic starts to work, so planting them now and expecting them to survive the drought without further watering is an almost cast-iron guaranteed method of getting some dead plants fairly quickly.
Apart from fixing their leaks, Thames Water and their mouthpiece need to be looking further ahead, on a larger scale. How about building all new homes with large underground storage tanks to keep winter rain for summer use? I'd love a really big tank, but the cost of retro-fitting one would be prohibitive. And why don't all new homes have built-in, efficient, hygienic methods of diverting grey water for further use, whether in the garden or for flushing loos? Messing around with hosepipes out of the window, and pumps, and syphons, is messy, inefficient and ridiculous. A proper system should be designed and plumbed in when the house is built.
Looking on the bright side, media pundits (albeit slightly faded ones) telling us to plant drought tolerant Mediterranean shrubs ought to be a powerful hex to end the drought. By late May we could all be shivering under leaden skies, like last year.
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