This morning, it finally rained!
Across parts of Britain, gardens that have spent much of the summer turning slowly from green to brown are receiving their first substantial drink in weeks. Lawns are scorched, borders are dusty and plants that survived the wet conditions earlier in the year have spent much of the summer struggling for water.
Too dry: after weeks with little meaningful rainfall, once-green lawns across Britain have turned brown. A climate-resilient garden needs to survive prolonged dry periods without relying on drinking water to keep everything green.
Yet on 27 August, gardeners are being warned not simply to welcome the rain, but to prepare for it.
Thunderstorms and intense downpours are forecast across large parts of England and Wales, bringing the possibility of localised flooding. In some places, weeks of desperately needed rain could arrive in a matter of hours.
Welcome to the climate-resilient garden.
Because the challenge facing Britain’s gardeners is no longer simply how to cope with too much water or too little of it.
Increasingly, we need to cope with both.
From saturated to scorched
The statistics behind this summer are extraordinary.
July 2026 was the driest recorded in England since records began in 1836. Just 10 per cent of the long-term average rainfall fell during the month. By its end, soil moisture deficits were approaching historic maximum levels, river flows were declining and reservoir storage had fallen sharply.
For gardeners, those national statistics translate into something much more immediate.
Grass turns brown. Containers require constant attention. Plants wilt. Newly planted trees and shrubs struggle to establish themselves. Soil that only months earlier seemed reluctant to drain becomes hard and dusty.
Then the rain returns.
And suddenly there can be too much of it.
That apparent contradiction is important because climate change is sometimes imagined as Britain simply becoming warmer. The reality is much more complicated. The broad projection for the UK is towards warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers, accompanied by changes in the intensity of extreme rainfall.
A climate-resilient garden, therefore, cannot simply be a drought-resistant garden filled with plants suited to hot weather, any more than it can simply be a flood-resistant garden designed to dispose of water as quickly as possible.
It needs to deal with variability.
Flood and drought are not necessarily opposites. Increasingly, they can be neighbours.
We have spent generations getting rid of rain
Look at how a conventional British home manages water.
Rain hits the roof, enters the gutter, flows down the drainpipe and disappears into the drainage system.
Water lands on the patio and runs towards a drain.
Driveways have traditionally been designed to shed water.
If a lawn becomes waterlogged, our instinct has often been to improve the drainage and move the water somewhere else.
For generations, we have treated rainwater largely as something to get rid of.
Then summer arrives.
The same household turns on a tap, fills a watering can or connects a hosepipe and uses highly treated drinking water to put water back onto the land from which we spent the wetter months removing it.
There is something rather absurd about that.
The climate-resilient garden turns this thinking around.
Instead of asking, “How quickly can I get rid of this water?”, we start asking, “How can I keep this water safely within the landscape for longer?”
Think sponge, not drain
The first reservoir in a climate-resilient garden isn’t a plastic tank.
It’s the ground.
Healthy soil can absorb rainfall, retain moisture and make that water available to plants long after the rain itself has stopped. Adding organic matter can improve soil structure and help moderate the swings between wet and dry conditions.
Vegetation matters too.
Trees intercept rain before it reaches the ground while their roots help create pathways through soil. Shrubs and layered planting provide shade. Ground-cover plants protect the soil surface. Organic mulch can reduce moisture loss while also improving the soil beneath it.
Hard surfaces do almost the opposite.
Water striking an impermeable patio or driveway has few places to go. During an intense downpour, it can rapidly enter drains, contributing to exactly the peak flows our drainage systems struggle to accommodate.
Replacing unnecessary impermeable surfaces with planting or permeable alternatives therefore has two benefits.
When it rains, more water can infiltrate.
When it doesn’t, more water remains available within the garden.
Store the good times
Of course, soil can only hold so much.
That’s where storage comes in.
Save it for a dry day: capturing rainfall from the roof provides water for the garden when the rain stops, while creating additional storage capacity for the next downpour. Even relatively simple rainwater harvesting can help turn rainfall from something we drain away into a resource.
The familiar water butt remains one of the simplest pieces of climate-resilience infrastructure a household can install. Larger tanks, linked water butts, ponds and underground rainwater harvesting systems can store considerably more.
But storage needs thinking about differently too.
A full water butt immediately before a thunderstorm has very little capacity to attenuate the next downpour. A system that uses stored water during dry periods creates capacity to capture the next rainfall event.
Then there are rain gardens.
A rain garden is essentially a shallow, planted depression designed to receive runoff from roofs or hard surfaces. During heavy rain, it temporarily fills, slowing water before allowing it to infiltrate. Plants at their lowest points can be chosen to tolerate temporary waterlogging, while those around their edges can cope with drier conditions.
It is almost a miniature model of what the whole climate-resilient garden should become.
During a storm, a sponge. During drought, a reservoir.
A warmer Britain isn’t simply a nicer Britain
Only ten days ago, on 17 August, Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice suggested that people should be less gloomy about climate change. He acknowledged that climate change is real, but suggested people should enjoy warmer weather, adding that if it meant English wine and sparkling wine became better, that would be “fantastic”.
English wine may indeed benefit from some changing conditions. But reducing a changing climate to warmer summers and better wine profoundly misunderstands the challenge confronting gardeners, farmers and water managers.
The problem isn’t simply a higher number on a thermometer.
It is what happens to the whole water cycle.
Higher temperatures increase evaporation and can accelerate the loss of moisture from soils and plants. Longer dry periods place vegetation under stress. At the same time, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, creating the potential for heavier rainfall when the right weather systems develop.
That means the same country can experience drought, wildfire and water restrictions, then face intense rainfall and localised flooding.
Indeed, just ten days after Tice’s remarks, that is precisely the kind of transition parts of Britain are experiencing.
One day’s weather does not prove climate change, of course. Nor can every drought, thunderstorm or flood be attributed directly to global warming.
But the broader trends matter.
The climate-resilient garden, therefore, needs to be designed not simply for a warmer Britain, but for a Britain experiencing greater stresses at both ends of the water cycle.
Plant for change, not simply heat
There is another temptation we should resist.
A warming climate doesn’t mean turning every British garden into Provence.
While average winters are expected to become warmer, occasional severe cold and frost do not simply disappear. Plants chosen solely because they thrive during increasingly warm summers can still be vulnerable when an unusually cold spell arrives.
The answer is diversity.
Plants capable of tolerating soils that fluctuate between wet winters and dry summers become increasingly valuable. Changing the topography of a garden can help too: small raised areas provide better-drained conditions, while shallow depressions accommodate plants capable of tolerating occasional inundation.
Too much, too quickly: after prolonged dry weather, intense rainfall can bring a very different problem. Climate-resilient gardens need to slow, absorb and safely accommodate water when heavy downpours arrive.
Trees provide shade and cooling. Deep-rooted perennials can become more resilient once established. Ground cover reduces exposed soil. Mulching helps retain moisture.
And the immaculate green lawn may need reconsidering.
An established lawn turning brown during drought is not necessarily dying. Grass naturally becomes dormant when water is scarce and will generally recover when rainfall returns.
Perhaps climate resilience also requires adjusting our idea of what a healthy summer garden should look like.
A brown lawn in August need not be a gardening failure.
Keeping it artificially green with drinking water during a drought might increasingly be the stranger choice.
Your garden is part of the catchment
None of this sounds particularly significant when viewed from one back garden.
One tree.
One water butt.
Twenty square metres of permeable paving.
A rain garden.
Some better soil.
But Britain has millions of gardens.
Collectively, they represent an enormous area of privately managed land sitting within our river catchments and urban drainage systems.
That means our gardens are not simply decorations surrounding our homes.
They are part of Britain’s water infrastructure.
A garden that slows rainfall reduces the speed at which water reaches a drain.
A garden that stores rainfall reduces demand for treated drinking water during drought.
A tree intercepts rainfall while providing shade during the heat.
Healthy soil stores water while supporting plants and biodiversity.
A pond can provide both water storage and habitat.
The individual contribution is small. The cumulative potential is enormous.
Designing for the weather we are getting
Today’s rain will be welcome.
But one period of heavy rainfall will not undo the effects of an exceptionally dry summer. Reservoirs, groundwater, rivers and soils respond over different timescales, and intense rainfall can run rapidly across dry or compacted surfaces rather than soaking slowly into the ground.
There is a peculiar irony in watching water rush towards a drain after spending weeks wishing it would rain.
That is perhaps the most important lesson for our gardens.
Climate resilience isn’t about choosing whether we prepare for a flood or drought.
We have to prepare for both.
Slow water when it arrives.
Give it somewhere safe to go.
Let it sink into healthy soil.
Capture some for another day.
Use trees and plants to create shade and reduce moisture loss.
Choose planting capable of tolerating the range of conditions your garden is increasingly likely to experience.
And perhaps stop regarding every brown lawn as a gardening failure.
For generations, the British garden has been designed around an assumption that tomorrow’s weather will broadly resemble yesterday’s.
That assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
The climate-resilient garden isn’t designed simply for hotter weather.
It is designed for less predictable water.
