August 2026 and it is dry. Not as dry as the Australian novel of the above title of course. Thankfully we store most of the water off the house and outbuildings and even the grey water from upstairs sinks, bath etc. With careful watering of the newer and more tender plants the garden is surviving. I even throw washing up water on the lawn.
As it is a little cooler today I’ve been out and around the garden sorting out things like a down pipe off the platform roof down the hill, which had got blocked by nest building in the absence of water in the gutter.
For some reason I’ve had respect for water and its storage and usage for as long as I can remember. I noticed old schemes where water was collected into basement tanks for pumping round the house in houses off the beaten track. I wondered at the engineers in the past who built reservoirs and even channels running miles round the contours of our hillsides to move water from one system to another to maintain water pressure. I realised that water often gets re-used as it moves down hill. When we had a drought in Yorkshire in the 1980’s my attention to water became even more focused. The site of streams of water tankers arriving on a hillside to pour water down into a reservoir was something to behold. I started finding containers to store water from roofs wherever possible. In our present garden we have taken that much more seriously.
When I built a large shed in the garden, I channeled the water from both sides of the roof round to a water butt at one side. When it was obvious that the butt was often overflowing, I connected a second to the first and then a third.
I did the same with the roof of a lean-to extension on the house and when both barrels there overflowed I realised I could feed the pond at the bottom of the garden, so ran a hose all the way down along the hedge line.
The biggest, yet still simple, scheme was when we put an overhang along the front of the house, which broke the line of the gutter downpipe. We had the builders just feed the shortened pipe into the new gutter and I piped that along the side of the house and into more barrels. Because they often overflow, I put a drip feed pipe from them back along the side of the house to water a normally arid piece of raised garden there.
In total there are now more than 10 water collection points. We even collect some grey water into a butt that normally gets fed by the roof at the back of the house. That one overflows into the drain.
All year round we use less water for our very green and colourful, wildlife friendly garden. That means more water for other people. Collecting the rainfall from every bit of roof means we make the most of what we get. It is worth mentioning that that the design of the garden, with plentiful trees and shrubs giving levels of shade, also reduces water use. The drought conditions picture below shows the greening effect of that shade on a patch of grass. South is left on the picture, so the shade has effect for the main part of the day.
At some point Ruth’s daughter set up home in New Zealand. When we visited we realised that the house collected all the rainwater off the roof into a big tank, to provide the water supply for the house. When I visited the local builders merchant and asked about rain butts, to collect water from a separate lean-to roof for use in the garden, they pointed me at tanks big enough to live in. Even in NZ though, there is still too little attention paid to water. Gardens are set up for having BBQ’s and too little attention is paid to shade. In similar drought conditions, those water tankers are going to individual houses to re-fill tanks.
Back in the UK, for too many years we have just assumed that someone else will provide us with as much water as we want. Builders have been allowed to build without thinking about water seriously either in terms of collection but also run-off. The result is that our ground is increasingly arid while at the same time we have increased flooding. The increasingly arid soil is also part of the problem creating more wildfires.
I used the word respect at the top of this article. I’ll add another – responsibility. There is often not a lot that we can do, as individuals, to change things for the better but we can help by showing respect for our utilities. If you can, set a water butt to collect water to use on your plants. In droughts like the present, I even take the washing up water and throw it over the lawn to help keep it alive.
This week I installed a sculpture paying homage to birds and butterflies at Stirley Farm, a charity project showcasing organic gardening and protection and encouragement of wildlife. The same week a friend asked if she could have one of my Paths of Desire series that depicts the effect of immoral and selfish overuse of cars on everything from the soil to wildlife and us. I’ve donated the sculpture and, as usual, the full sale cost of the other artwork goes straight to a charity, bypassing me. A week with smiles in it.
During the current heatwave it is pleasant to get out in the garden early. We use rain and grey water most of the year but supply is running low so I thought I’d use a hose for a change to help things along before a likely ban comes in.
A couple of clips here that I am not sure about (nothing new there). The first (ignoring the Tits) is obviously a young bird. At first the second looks the same, not sure how to get at the food then suddenly works out a way. Then all becomes clearer on a new clip of the mother feeding the young one at the feeder.
I should have put Questions in that title but it was getting a bit wordy. Hopefully it will make sense in a minute.
Let’s gets straight to the catchy bit. Like many living things, cuttlefish reproduce by mating and one common tactic in the mating game is for males to try to become dominant or ‘alpha’. Unlike most of us, cuttlefish can change their surface colouring (other than by adding makeup or foolishly sitting too long in the sun). They do this in response to stress and as a way of sending messages, like bird calls.
Now, people who look at evolution too simplistically see the ‘dominant’ word and think that is all that matters. They rush out and buy supplements and sit staring at themselves in gyms. This applies to all genders and sexual preference because dominance applies in a groups.
The cuttlefish is a good example of alternative strategies. The males, especially smaller ones, can adopt female colouring on the side facing the dominant male and a male display pattern on the other side. Clever. Some males also herd females into a hollow and sit over them, getting exclusive access. Other clever males can even adopt full female colouring and sit in the pile under the dominant males quietly mating when the chance comes.
So far so very male minded. The male cuttlefish is either a bulky bully or a sneaky smally. Evolution is way more complicated than that and females instinctively know it (they have evolved that way). The classic male interpretation of the herding into a hollow habit is that the females trade some loss of freedom for protection and access to the dominant gene. How simplistic.
I have said elsewhere that evolution is the survival of those that happen to survive, to try to emphasise this complexity. The statistics will indicate that there is no one way for a single individual to predict what will make their offspring survive. There are options that are simpler to adopt and that also sit higher up in the pile of options but there is also variation in both mating and offspring care adopted. This indicates that the statistics often favour those who adopt each way bets. So females let the dominant male sit there on edge guarding his harem and then sneak off and mate with other males who have shown the resilience not to give up and the wit to appear in the right place for the opportunity to arise. That ensures the most favourable balance of gene survival to deal with the complexities of survival. Females also mate with multiple males to let the sperm and ova do the selection.
So what has all this to do with reasoning? The first stage of reasoning is hinted at above. You only get past the simplistic understanding of evolution if you ask questions. The questions to ask here are ‘how does the male cuttlefish decide which range of colours to adopt?’ and ‘how does it decide that fighting is not the best option but sneaking into the hollow has good chances’? If you think a bit further on from that you can ask how the successful adoption of a tactic get passed on to offspring? Is it a better instinctive colouring ability or a brighter brain?
Of course I don’t know the answers to those questions but the existence of the questions has wider implications for the ways we reason about all sorts of things. Sadly the habit of asking questions seems to have got a bit lost in some of the narrower, results led, approaches to education that we have adopted. We already had a habit of using reasoning to show dominance in various ways, because as well as helping people recruiting others to jobs and courses, exams and qualifications have always been used in that way. I think we are in danger of losing the habit of asking questions about our own reasoning. As with evolution and the cuttlefish we need to keep our options open. We must remember that the ‘fitness’ to purpose of a person can’t simply be measured by exams but also involves adaptability and the ability to ask relevant questions.
Shelley are visiting The Hepworth Gallery Gardens in Wakefield on a sketching outing. I thought I’d give you a bit of (hopefully) entertaining background on one fascinating aspect of the place.
The Gallery is actually built on an Island. On one Side is the River Calder, which of course meanders there all the way from the hills above Hebden Bridge. Alongside the route of the Calder are various bits of canal that are sometimes pure canal and at others join the river. From the Hepworth onwards, the canals start getting much bigger. If you are sat in a narrow boat in one of the locks you suddenly feel small and vulnerable.
‘Hepworth’ Island
Just by the Hepworth a canal cut runs away from the river and the Hepworth is on the island made by that bit of the canal and the river. On the other side of the bridge from the car park there is a boat yard servicing the canal. I once watched a canal boat being lifted from a lorry, over the boat yard and into the water by the footbridge. You are now in the flat and marshy land east of the Pennines.
Shelley Village Hall is in a different sort of place. It is on a hill that is part of a river catchment area. On one side of the watershed a river runs down the valley towards Huddersfield and on the other the water runs down into the valley through Denby Dale. The river running to Huddersfield joins the Colne and Holme rivers and heads north east joining the Calder at Cooper Bridge. Meanwhile the River Dearne on the other side heads off to the Sculpture Park before shooting off south east to join the Rother going through Rotherham. Rivers seem to do odd things.
All the rivers mentioned so far are eventually headed towards the Humber and Hull. They are part of a much bigger catchment area. One part starts in the Hills above Settle, where rivers head across to Lancashire, up to Cumbria, over to Tyneside and, of course, down through Yorkshire. All those Dales and places like York that we like to visit have rivers that eventually end up in the same place.
Perhaps more astonishingly is all the rivers, like the Dearne that eventually reach the Humber from a southerly direction. The Dearne joins others coming down from the south Pennines, including the Don before joining the Ouse on its way to the Humber. That wasn’t always true though. Until some amazing river engineering by a Dutch engineer the Don joined the most astonishing tributary of the Humber. This one originally flows through another place associated with the Arts – Stoke on Trent. Yes, a whole set of rivers on the other side of the Pennines meander around as the Trent heading southwards, then turning east and finally north, before joining up with the water from Shelley and heading to the sea.
So, as you sit sketching on your engineered island, think about the amazing geography of rivers and human attempts to control and use them. Your Shelley water flows down below our house in Ossett in both a canal and a river. Coal from pits under Thornhill was originally transported on the canal, before the railways were built in the same valley. Incidentally, the flood defenses built near the Hepworth lost a traditional foot route and Ruth is part of a group working with the Council, the Canal and Rivers Trust and Sustrans to get routes restored for pedestrians and wheelchairs and cyclists. Another set of connections in my fascination with what I’ve called Paths of Desire.
