Come Into the Garden ; Believe It or Not, Our Climate Is Getting Warmer and Drier - Giving the Perfect Conditions for a Mediterranean Garden. Add Pretty Pots and Candles to Create Your Very Own Eden for the Last Days of Summer... [Eire Region]

Summary

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July was wet and miserable and August is not shaping up much better -- so talk of dry Mediterranean gardens might seem mistimed, if not misjudged. But bear with me a little. The climate is changing. The trend is towards drier, warmer summers (and wetter winters, alas), while rainfall is becoming more erratic. This does not mean that we are getting very much less of it, just that it is not coming when we necessarily want or expect it.

So our gardens are having to become used to longer periods of dryness, interspersed with sodden wet and even flooding. All the indications are that our summers will tend -- and I use that word, well aware that it covers a multitude of sins -- to become hotter and drier. This has been predicted for at least a decade now and so, six years ago, we decided to make a dry garden. The site is an old yard that at first was unpromising for any kind of garden, as there was no soil at all, just a layer of tarmac over solid stone.

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Come Into the Garden ; Believe It or Not, Our Climate Is Getting Warmer and Drier - Giving the Perfect Conditions for a Mediterranean Garden. Add Pretty Pots and Candles to Create Your Very Own Eden for the Last Days of Summer... [Eire Region]

However, with a shovel, the tarmac lifted like orange peel, and we dug out about 3in of the underlying shale, creating a pair of beds like shallow trays. I got a hose and tried to fill them with water, but it ...

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