Every gardener has a Dread List: frost, honey fungus, ground elder, blackspot, now box caterpillar…… Mine, for most of my gardening life, has been drought.
Drought is slow torture. I suffered it for forty years in Essex. The clouds passed over, full of promise, again and again, and always seemed to drop their payload two and a half miles north, on Great Bardfield. Was it the valley there, and the little River Pant, that made them relent? (I’m not sure mind you, that in Bardfield they weren’t feeling the same about Great Saling. ‘Them up the road; they always gets it’.)
My second gardening life, London apart, is in the New Forest. Who knew that the Isle of Wight casts a rain-shadow? So it appears. A promising Front heads up the Channel, grey clouds across the horizon. Then it veers off, or divides, and Ventnor on the south coast gets the shower, while across the Solent the grass goes on parching and the trees flagging. This year is a prime example; a dry spring, a heatwave in April, warmth in May, some rain in June, no rain at Wimbledon, then another heatwave. August had just enough rain to be irritating, not to soak in and do any good.
I’ve always had a three-year rule for new trees and shrubs: total tlc, can or hose, for two years. But no proper growth in year three and I’m ready to give up. I don’t of course. I just fret. At least when it all gets too much I can go to Wales and watch the forest trees. Up there in the Rhinogs a young oak can sometimes manage a yard a year.
