I spend four days releasing butterflies into the garden; some into the front, where the viper’s bugloss provides the perfect sanctuary, and others to the buddleia in the back. I release a total of 27. I write this figure down in my notebook, which reminds me that 12 were parasitised by Sturmia bella and two didn’t manage to pupate. That’s not a bad emergence rate, and probably better than if they had remained wild. Certainly better odds than they would have had if they’d been strimmed. It feels good. It feels good to do good things.

The original caterpillars, that first batch I collected from Wild Park, are not far behind. They started to pupate just a couple of days after this batch and it won’t be long before they, too, are set free in the garden. Meanwhile the patch of nettles that was completely destroyed two weeks ago is ripe with the freshest of new growth. I check them most days, when I walk with Tos around the park. Surely it’s only a matter of time before I find more caterpillars on them?

I wonder if the lack of rain is causing, or contributing to, all of these caterpillars? We are, apparently, not yet in drought but I can’t see how. The grass is yellow, the plants are withered and dying, the pond is disappearing before my eyes. And yet it will be faring better than wild areas because I’m keeping it hydrated (well, as hydrated as I can). I’m showering into a bucket and keeping washing-up water and the dog’s bath water, which I know only contain eco-detergents, and am reusing it in the garden. Are more butterflies coming to gardens and parks because they’re less parched than the food plants in the countryside? Maybe.

I buy a new mesh tent. It’s bigger than the child’s one I’ve been using for the last few years. It’s taller and wider and has a large door that takes up one side of it, which makes it easy to add plant material and clean. I could stand a vase of nettles in there if I wanted, to save me having to fetch new material from the park so often. It will be just my luck that I don’t need to use it, now that I’ve had my fill of caterpillars for this year. But something tells me there will be more.

Common backswimmer, Notonecta glauca

The backswimmer is so called because it swims on its back, using its oar-like legs to propel itself through the water, like a rowing boat. It’s also called a water boatman but so is another species, Corixa punctata, which is smaller, vegetarian and swims on its front. The backswimmer is a fierce predator that attacks prey like tadpoles and small fish, using its forelegs to grab its next victim and its ‘beak’ to stab it with poison, to kill it. Gruesome, yes, but a sign of a healthy pond environment – if yours can sustain backswimmers it means there’s plenty to eat.

Backswimmers have a large, silvery body covered in fine hairs, which they use to trap air when they come to the surface, so they can breathe below water. They are light brown with large, reddish eyes.

The backswimmer was one of the first species to colonise my new pond. One day I came home and found lots of tiny crab-like things bobbing in the water. These, I discovered later, were backswimmer nymphs, which grew through the season and eventually metamorphosed into the large adults that took a chance on my pond and laid their eggs. The second generation also laid eggs, and suddenly I had a family – large adults that would glisten as they swam to the surface for air, little nymphs that gradually shed their outer skin and grew into adults. One day I found a shed skin and kept it as treasure.

To garden for backswimmers is to have a pond where lots of species can live, so the backswimmers can eat them. It’s a backswimmer-eat-tadpole world, and I like it.

July

I work away for a week at the Hampton Court Flower Show, where I have a nature table and chat to children and adults about the amazing natural finds you can display in your home. I have skulls and shed snake skins, a hedgehog ‘pelt’, a bit of bumblebee nest, a couple of hatched birds’ eggs. All from home. Throughout the week I find other bits and pieces: a ladybird pupa that ecloses on the table, live caterpillars that eat nettles, tadpoles, green parakeet feathers. It’s a week of hanging out with my treasures and talking to people about how great my treasures are.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a COYPU skull! Isn’t it great? Look at its orange TEETH!’

It’s a busy week, in which I stay in a tiny bedsit and walk to work every day through the straw-like grassland of Bushy Park. I crave my home life, the garden, my girls, rain. But it’s worth it. On the last day, a young boy begs me for my fox skull and I give it to him but ask that, in return, he always looks out for the wild things. We strike a deal and he takes it home. Another child has the grass snake skin and many others take feathers. By the end of the week, everyone wants a nature table, wants treasures as precious as mine. It feels good.

I arrive home to a dried-up garden and an even drier pond. I should have known. The grass here is also straw, the plants are wilting, the flowers devoid of bees. I crouch down at the pond edge. Brooklime, curled pondweed and duck weed lie on the bottom like deflated balloons. The mud is still muddy and I hope things have tucked themselves in here, waiting out the drought. Maybe not: I also track hedgehog and bird footprints – what dying morsels have they been helping themselves to? Everything, by the looks of it. Tadpoles, certainly, there were hundreds a week ago. Backswimmers? Neither the adults nor the wingless nymphs are here, the adults will have flown elsewhere but the nymphs – which hatched from eggs laid in May – will be in the bellies of other beings. No dragonfly or damselfly larvae, no whirligig beetles, no pond skaters, no caddis flies. What have I done? I lie on my belly, my head and arms in the ‘hole’, and root around the deflated balloons. There’s not even dead tadpoles, no sign they were ever here. I turn leaves and stems to reveal the occasional pond snail, some leeches and water hoglice missed by truffling hedge pigs. But nothing else. Welp.

It’s not just hoggy footprints in the pond that gives them away but also the wet, muddy footprints I watch them leave on the trail camera at night. I catch up on a week of videos in which there has still been no rain, but suddenly moisture and mud as hedgehogs cross the patio with bellies full of dead pond. Some of them even have bits of plant material caught between their claws.

I’m pleased they and the birds have had a good meal, it’s not like things have been easy for them. But all of that work! Three years old, nothing special, but the beginnings of something, a solid ecosystem. Now we have to start again. Will the backswimmers return? They were some of the first colonisers of the pond and some have spent their whole lives in it; I’d catch their silvery bodies glinting in the light as they surfaced for air. Where are they? Will the common darter dragonflies return, the lone red male defending his territory from the stick I’ve wedged into mud by the side of the pond and romantically called a dragonfly perch? The damselflies, the little brown beetles that hung around the edges, the mosquito larvae, the non-biting midge larvae. Where did they go? If garden ponds are drying up, you can bet those in the wild are, too. So where did they go? Rivers, which are full of human excrement, nitrogen run-off and pesticides? What a choice.

Drying out is a perfectly natural thing for a pond to do. So-called ‘ephemeral’ or ‘vernal’ ponds dry out every summer in the wild – some studies have shown that this can put species like frogs at an advantage over fish, as frogs need ponds only until summer, when the froglets leave for the land, while fish live in them all year round. And fish eat frog tadpoles, so a pond without fish is better for frogs. The area of mud that’s revealed as the water level drops is known as the ‘drawdown zone’ and can be the most biologically rich area of the pond. Lots of species can survive here for several months, with some even laying eggs here. But I wonder if the drawdown zone is as biologically rich when there are hungry hedgehogs snuffling around? When the pond dries out in early July? When there’s nowhere for flying insects to escape to as other bodies of water will be in the same state or too polluted to live in?

I’m cross with Emma for not noticing that the pond was drying out, for walking past it every day to top up the hedgehog bowl but not being awake to the other things going on around her. If she’d mentioned it I would have asked her to keep it topped up, not completely full but partially, so the tadpoles and other aquatic species had somewhere to continue living. It’s not her job, and she has plenty of other things to do. But how could she not have noticed?

I take the opportunity to clear some of the plant material, which was starting to take over the pond, and which I had earmarked as an autumn job. I rake it, gently, to avoid scraping the muddy layer, which holds so much carbon, and scoop it out of the hole. I sift through it, looking again for signs of tadpoles or other life – nothing but the leeches, snails and hoglice I had already spotted. I leave it piled up at the edge so they can crawl back in. I fill the watering can with tap water and leave that at the side, too, so I can start topping up the pond tomorrow. A few inches will be enough for thirsty mammals, at least.

It rains in the night. Blows in on the wind and smashes against the bedroom windows. I lie awake listening to every drop, feel the earth cry with relief. Its tears run off pavements and into gutters; a brief, unexpected five minutes in the darkness. I think of hedgehogs getting wet for the first time in weeks. Do they run to shelter or embrace it? I think of dust washing off leaves, of raindrops disappearing into baked earth. I think of tumbling out of bed and into the garden, naked, to dance in it. It stops as instantly as it had started but there has been just enough of it for the smell of petrichor to waft in on the breeze.

In the morning the water butt is still empty. A fat slug had been sleeping in the pipe that connects the downpipe to the water butt and I didn’t have the heart to evict it, is it still there? I pull the pipe out from the butt. A bit of sludge comes out on my hand, followed, eventually, by the slug’s little inquisitive face. ‘Hey, slug.’ It shrinks back into its pipe, where it will no doubt wedge itself in and block more rain from entering the water butt. I curse myself for being so soft. But there’s no more rain forecast and, I have to admit, it’s the perfect place for a slug to sit out a heatwave.

It’s day one of the anticipated two hottest days ever in the UK. I spend the earliest hours outside, throwing grey water from the shower and washing-up bowl around plants that need it the most, adding precious fresh water from the tap, and therefore from our chalk aquifer, to the bird bath. I worry about the chalk aquifer. Local news reports tell me we’re in a good spot here in Brighton, as the aquifer, rather than human-made reservoirs, holds our drinking water, and levels are still good so we can carry on as usual. The chalk acts like a sponge and holds on to water beneath the ground, which is pumped out for the city to drink and bathe and wash cars and windows, and waste to our hearts’ content because there remain no restrictions on it. Chalk aquifers feed chalk streams, which are already under threat from pollution and climate change. So shouldn’t we be limiting our water use? Chalk aquifers are also extremely vulnerable to pollution, as the water that runs into them can be contaminated by anything from nitrates from farmland to oil and tyre pollution from roads. The Aquifer Partnership (TAP) was set up to promote the protection and cleaning of Brighton’s water. TAP promotes using less water while doing more to slow the flow into the ground so it’s less polluted by the time it reaches the chalk, with time, sunshine, plants and microbes playing their part in breaking down pollutants. How do you slow the flow of water into the ground? Gardens, plants, water butts. Funny how everything is connected.

Why are news reporters encouraging us to carry on wasting water? Why are people still washing their cars and patios and why is the man in the estate behind me power-washing bollards of all things? Bollards. I ask him to water the estate’s three silver birch trees that stand, wilting in the sun.

‘It’s not my job,’ he says, ‘I’m here to clean the bollards.’

‘Please, just a bit of water, just throw it in the direction of the trees while you walk past them on your way to the next bollard. It’s not rained for weeks,’ I plead.

‘You’ll need to email the garden management team,’ he says, for he is not budging on the matter of his water being only for bollards. Meanwhile I’m using manky bits of grey water to hydrate shrivelled plants so I can keep the garden alive, keep the park’s trees alive. How many teaspoons have I lost watering the garden from the washing-up bowl? How many bits of spaghetti are draped over frazzled plants? The injustice of it all. Of all of it.

I try to work, with the news on for temperature updates. There’s an air of catastrophe, of Covid-esque anxiety. The streets are empty and I don’t want to go outside. It feels like those early days in March 2020 when we didn’t know if we’d be put into lockdown, and what to expect if we did. When will it hit 40ºC and where will it hit first? What will it feel like? For us and the wildlife? Will the birds fly? Will the hedgehogs wake up thirsty and go searching for moisture in the heat of the day? Will it be like a solar eclipse? The last decent eclipse was in the summer of 1999. I was 18 and Mum, Ellie and Anna were away so I had the house to myself. When the eclipse came I sat in the garden and felt the shade draw in, felt everything dull and quieten, tuned in to the silencing of the birds. Then, after a few minutes, everything started up again. I don’t know why I’m thinking of the solar eclipse on a day where the sun is anything but eclipsed. Will everything fall silent? Will it all fall silent?

I feel drowsy and fall asleep on the sofa, there’s nothing else to do. I wake to more of the same: obsessive reporting of rising temperatures across the country, but not yet 40ºC.

The garden is in shade now so I venture out in it. The earth is cracked and sore, like chapped lips, the worms a distant memory, hopefully safe somewhere in the furthest depths of it. Who eats worms? Birds, hedgehogs, frogs, badgers. And where are the caterpillars and beetles? The living things? I have nightmares about moles. I imagine cross-sections of earth with stuck, roasting moles waiting to die. Instead, I know they’re coming to the surface in search of food and frazzling in the sun.

I need to do something. My wonderful wildflower meadow is yellow straw. It’s a fire hazard. My neighbourhood is so built-up that one spark from a nearby barbecue could set the whole lot in flames. I get on my hands and knees and check it for wildlife. There’s nothing – no frogs, no slow worms, no caterpillars, no grasshoppers. Where are they? Did they perish? Did they not exist in the first place? Literally nothing is living here.

With shears I chop bits of it in front of the pollinator border, smoothing each piece over and checking again for hogs and frogs, although I know this process is pointless. The dust hits the back of my throat as I work my way through it. I leave a strip on the left that has not been bleached by sun and another around the pond that has benefited from its proximity to water. I plump up border perennials over cut grass stalks, give nepeta and geranium some room to spread out.

In its fourth year the meadow has lost much of its floral diversity. Only the strip beside the pond is still packed with flowers, the rest is grass. Grass is an important food source for many species of wildlife but it’s not as pretty as it could be and, besides, this year it’s dead. Perhaps it’s the attention from the animals, or the soil is too rich, that makes the grass grow faster and stronger, out-competing the wildflowers. I’ve sowed seed and planted expensive plugs of yellow rattle, a semi-parasite of grass that limits its growth so wildflowers can thrive. Such attempts have failed. But in the front garden, which was covered in plastic and stones for many years, and was then swamped by a forest of honeywort, the soil may be less fertile, better for wildflowers. It gets more light and – perhaps – has less footfall from heavy mammals. Well, at least Tosca doesn’t rampage through it. This is one of many reasons that I have decided to move the meadow into the front garden for next year and keep most of the back short. It’s not an easy decision. Most years the meadow is home to all sorts of things: bees, butterflies, grasshoppers, frogs, slow worms, caterpillars. And the hedgehogs love to party in it, of course. But with the partying hedgehogs, the playful foxes and our own little bouncy canine, it gets a lot of ‘attention’, and that doesn’t seem to be good for the production of flowers.

The front garden will be a proper meadow, with different types of grasses along with perennial favourites like red clover, ox-eye daisy and knapweed. These will join the few survivors that managed to live beneath the honeywort: the viper’s bugloss, lungwort, primroses and Macedonian scabious. Perhaps I’ll throw in some field poppy seeds to make more of a display of it. The bulbs, too, will look nice in spring before everything else grows. Maybe.

I save grass seeds from yellow stalks, combing them through my fingers into a bucket, where tufted vetch and greater knapweed seeds wait for their moment in the soil. I dig up self-seeded ox-eye daisies and red clover, both from the patio and the pavement outside the front, and plant them in pots to move to their final growing place, when it’s not so hot. I do the same with ribwort plantain, red, white and bladder campion, evening primrose and sweet rocket. I water them with precious grey water and store them in the side return, in the shade. I buy more yellow rattle seed, to sow later.

The day ends with us just shy of the 38.7ºC record set in Cambridge in 2019. This will be broken tomorrow. I try to focus on the new phases of the garden, of where the front garden plants might go now they will be replaced with meadow. I focus on the small things, or try to. The big things are just too big today.

We wake at 5.00 a.m. and check the weather forecast for the temperature.

‘It’s only 20 degrees,’ says Emma.

‘I’ll take Tos out,’ I reply. It makes sense; the ground will be too hot for her little paws within a few hours.

We head out into the early light, to blue skies and a fresh breeze that’s almost cooling. To a stretch of the Downs closest to my house, which I can walk to and from in a 10km loop. There’s a world of ‘city’ before we get to the country: a mass of car dealerships, a ring road, a giant supermarket. Yet we trek from this to corn buntings and yellowhammers, to six-spot burnet moths and brown-banded carder bees – it never ceases to amaze me. I wait impatiently as Tosca stops at every lamp post.

I like the world better at this time of day. There are fewer people and more birds, or at least the illusion of such. No one to bump into. No fumes from the road or traffic to wait for before we can cross. No bubbling rage as I pass people sitting in their vehicles with their engines on, polluting the atmosphere for absolutely no reason at all.

The scrub in the shadow of the Downs is as frazzled and yellow as my garden, but the thistle flowers are the brightest pink against the blue sky. I am grateful for them. Everything is dusty and dry but there is just a hint of hope, of freshness, here, that I wouldn’t have realised had I stayed at home and sulked.

‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ says Tosca’s little face. ‘Isn’t everything great?’ We will hit 40ºC today, somewhere in the UK, and I will cry. But, for now, I savour these precious, peaceful moments with the dog.

There’s not much wildlife to ogle, few singing birds and not many insects, although this patch of Downs isn’t as flower-rich as it could be and I don’t take Tos on the nature reserve. There are a few buzzing bees, making the most of the cooler early-morning temperatures, there are caterpillars still dripping from nettles that haven’t yet been chopped down. We stand at the highest point and look over Brighton, over dry fields and scrub, over lush, watered golf courses, over the glistening sea. ‘Where are we headed, with all of this, Tos? What will happen?’ She looks at me with her giant hazel eyes, and then moves her gaze to my pocket, where the treats are. I throw one for her, returning my gaze to the sea. I am so broken by all of this, for god’s sake could I not just cheer up for the dog?

I break the rules and throw her ball on to the empty golf course. Her feet are horses’ hooves on the ground as she races after it, returning and dropping it in my hand each time, for half a treat. I kneel down to give her a drink and a kiss. ‘Our little secret,’ I whisper, as the first golfers arrive and we move on.