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.
We make our way back, down the hills, my boots echoing on hard ground, through another golf course and the supermarket car park, back to the sticky heat of the city. It’s not yet 8.00 a.m. but I check the paving with the back of my hand and try to walk in the shade as much as possible. Eventually I panic and pick Tosca up and carry her the last sunny leg of the journey. I will not let this heat burn her paws.
At home she sleeps, contented, and I switch on the rolling news, again, to torment myself. It quickly gets hot and becomes too hot to do anything. I have all the windows and doors open to encourage a breeze, I lift the hatch into the attic so the hot air has somewhere to escape to. I try to work from the sofa but am distracted by the weight of everything. I can hear sparrows but I can’t enjoy them. How are they coping? Is there enough food for their chicks? How can there be, when the grass is straw, when the earth is cement? How many dead chicks lie in dusty nests?
If you’re a bee, or a hoverfly or a mole or a stag beetle, and you nest in the ground, you need that ground to remain as you found it (permitting, of course, the changes that come with the seasons). If it bakes and cracks, you’re dead. If there’s a fire, you’re dead. If there’s a flood, you’re dead. A mole might do better than a stag beetle larva, on account of being more mobile and therefore having a larger stretch of land to escape to, but these extremes of ‘weather’, which we have been warned about for years, are pushing already-declining species further towards extinction. What scientists call ‘change of land use’, i.e. turning wild places into cities, giant industrial farms, golf courses and shooting ranges, have already made us one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Hedgehogs, birds, butterflies, bees: all dead or dying. Other species whose numbers we simply don’t know about because they haven’t been studied. Wasps? No one cared to count them until a few years ago. Hoverflies? It’s complicated. Beetles? Hmm. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) suggests that one in seven native species faces extinction in the UK and more than 40 per cent are in decline. Add in a cocktail of flood and drought and fire and you quickly see why people are gluing themselves to motorways.
The irony is that as the world warms, many species, where able, will be travelling north in search of cooler temperatures. We Brits could, as a nation, be their ambulance. We could help French bees and butterflies cross the Channel, we could bring food plants from southern Europe to help them adjust. We could save species that may, one day, if we pull our socks up, return to the habitats they came from, when and if they cool down again. But we’re not going to do that, are we? Some species have already arrived on their own – European bee-eaters are nesting in Norfolk, swallowtail and long-tailed blue butterflies are breeding in Sussex, several other species are arriving in Scotland, a country that was once considered too cold for them. These are climate refugees and we should be doing everything we can to help them, along with the human refugees we are also, shamefully, turning away. Instead we cover the land in paving and plastic and turn rivers into soups of pesticides, algae and human excrement. Oh, and just a few more coal mines, they say. Just a bit more oil.
That soil, which needs to remain a certain way for the species that live in it? We need it too. It’s where we grow our food.
Outside I top up the bird bath, throw a bit of water in the pond so there is something in the bottom, so the mud doesn’t become cement. I check the hedgehog feeding station and assess which frazzled plant is most deserving of manky washing-up water today. (Astilbes. It’s always astilbes.)
At one point I have a craving for cold spaghetti bolognaise. Cold bolognaise! Of all things. I sit with the craving for a while and then get up and make it. I fry onions and garlic, add carrots, courgettes, vegan mince, tomatoes and masses of fresh oregano. I boil a pan of spaghetti. The kitchen becomes uncomfortably hot but I keep going, still with this craving for cool food that I am making myself hot to create. I let it cool naturally initially, then plate it up and put it in the fridge.
The 40ºC record is set in late afternoon, somewhere in Lincolnshire. I sit on the sofa, spooning cold bolognaise into my mouth, and cry. How is this happening? How are we letting this happen?
The thing about experiencing drought during climate breakdown is that, while I’m a nervous wreck due to the breakdown part of the story, others remind me, ‘It has been hot before.’
‘Is this another lecture about 1976?’ I ask my mother, on the phone at some point during the hottest week the UK has ever experienced.
