The effects of drought in the garden

It has been like a little glimpse of the summers of the future, hasn't it? Forty degrees centigrade, weeks with no rain, and levels of sunshine and heat that just made gardening impossible for a fair-skinned, heat-averse creature like me.

The rains may now have arrived, but summer has definitely left its mark on my garden. Here is the sorry state of one of my Hebes:

And my Tree Peony is even worse:

And when plants are stressed, there is a knock-on on the wildlife, too. This, for example, is typical of the state of blackberries around my garden right now. Each berry tends to have only a few drupelets (the name of each fleshy blob) instead of a dozen or more, so that means much less food for birds:

Indeed, some of my blackberries have been so heat-blasted they look like they've been charred in an oven (evoking painful memories of some dinners I've prepared). There's no goodness left here:

But then there are the signals of the amazing resilience of some of our garden habitats, such as what happens to grass once you add a bit of rain. Here are photos from my bedroom taken two weeks apart, the first after six weeks in which just 10mm of rain fell, and then after almost 50mm of rain fell in a week:

Before:

And after:

But our lawns will struggle if this is what they face year after year. There is only so much bouncebackability in nature before the stress begins to show. Change is happening, and it will have profound effects on us, on our gardens, and on wildlife. We will have to adapt, and wildlife will have to do its best to do likewise.

Limiting our impact on the climate has to remain top priority, but finding ways to cope with the change we've already baked in will be a challenge we and wildlife will increasingly have to face. If that sounds gloomy, well, there lies the third challenge - harnessing the resolve to do something about it.