Full Monty: coping with drought

I hope it is raining as you read this. Fat steady drops falling for hours from a grey sky that do not batter but soak slowly into the thirsty soil. But chance would be a fine thing. As I write this the ground is bone dry. It has barely rained for a month, was a dry spring and an exceptionally dry winter. The streams are running dry and plants are digging into reserves that should be stored for much later in the year.

I realise that this is all relative. Should you be reading this in Australia, say, or South Africa, you might be entitled to an ironic smile at what we laughingly call a drought. In the greater scheme of things Britain has never been truly short of water. But gardeners are sensitive souls, or should be. The variations and fluctuations of weather affect us minutely and climate change is the giant elephant in the back garden that none of us know how to deal with – not least because none of us are sure how it is changing and what effects it is having in the garden. Give us another 100 years and we may be in a position to asses the situation.

But I do not have 100 years. If I am still around and able to garden in 20 years’ time I will be happy. I (and arguably everyone alive) need to engage with the issues that climate change is raising today, not in a 100 or even 20 years. There is nothing noble or virtue-seeking about this. I am not trying to save the planet. Apart from being slightly beyond my remit, the planet will do just fine although we humans might be in a pickle. No, I am thinking for the moment only about my garden.

Which is why I took apart the Dry Garden earlier this spring, and before replanting the things that were being submerged and swamped, like the irises, knautia, sedums, euphorbias and tulbaghia, I added stones. Big ones. Just over two years ago, I was offered a pile of big ‘Old Red Sandstone’ building stones. They were said to have once formed a stone bridge but when I went to see them, they were an amorphous heap, mostly hidden by brambles and nettles. However, I could see that there were large and interesting stones, the price was very reasonable and thoughts of a stone folly in the garden danced irresistibly before me.

Then the pandemic came along and they sat, uncollected, going nowhere. However, my son and I eventually went over earlier this spring and loaded his pick-up truck with the ones we could (just) physically move, grunting and heaving with a sack truck and ropes. These are now ensconced as part of the Dry Garden and I have replanted around them.

The idea of using stone came really from my visits to Greek gardens. The dryness they have to cope with is twice anything we might conceive here in wet Herefordshire, and yet the combination of stone walls and the fallen stones from old buildings with plants growing among them is very beautiful. My thoughts were to use the atypical dryness and sunniness of the site to double down on Mediterranean planting.

There is more stone to come, hidden everdeeper under the brambles, and I could have another pass, building up a little. However, they are as heavy as I can possibly manage and without some kind of crane or hoist, it is almost impossible to get them into position without trashing all the planting. By and large it is always better to complete all heavy-duty landscaping before beginning any planting.

I could perhaps sift through the heap to find smaller stones, but most are pretty big. And there is something monumental and powerful about large objects in a garden – especially if made from natural materials like stone or wood. They become sculptural without deliberately being so and open out different ways of planting and of looking at plants.

Is it now a rockery? If so, then it has become one by accident. But maybe I have stumbled upon the beginnings of one, a kind of postmodern, deconstructed version where the stone has tumbled and fallen asunder, but which still dominates both the appearance and the style of planting. Who knows? Sometimes you end up where you are meant to be by heading off in a different direction altogether.